Chapter 24 - Eye on the future

Monday, September 28 | 44 days until the conference| 332registrations That morning, they agreed to automate the planned social media updates and mailings. Casper had found an easy tool for it, which would save them a lot of time. Now that the team was on a roll, they found some space to focus on the physical aspects of the conference. Although it was still uncertain whether or not they would make it, they had to prepare the conference properly. Victor added this point to the agenda, during a short meeting with his staff. Joined by Catja, he reflected on the SoSuStar conference, where they had noticed some things to pay special attention to at Rodentia as well. ‘The Wi-Fi was topnotch,’ Catja began. ‘I don’t know how they did it, but it was much faster than most other events I go to. But they’d forgotten one thing. Electricity!’ She turned to Martine, her voice getting progressively higher. ‘My phone had run out of power by midmorning already, but the few sockets they had were taken all the time.’ Victor remembered how small groups of people had congregated around the scarce electric supplies. ‘I searched the entire building, no power to be found. Eventually I pretended to be interested in some pimply exhibitor’s story for about ten minutes, just to be able to plug my phone in at his stand.’ Martine laughed. Catja continued: ‘Can we not make sure that everyone is able to charge their phone or tablet at our conference?’ ‘Additional power sockets, I think so, but it’s likely to be expensive,’ said Martine, looking at Victor. Catja strengthened her argument: ‘I wasn’t able to tweet anything the entire afternoon, I couldn’t participate in the polls, and I couldn’t even post pictures on Facebook.’ Victor knew she was right. ‘If we’re making all of this effort to get our participants onto social media, then we shouldn’t just offer decent and fast Wi-Fi, but enough electricity too,’ he said. ‘Let me know what it’ll cost, it seems a worthwhile investment to me.’ .... ---- Written by Gerrit Heijkoop & Paula Vos Narrated by Kevin Stillwell