The conference has been held.
It was organized with haste, as long time was lost without anyone volunteering to lead the effort of organizing it, until
As a consequence of the haste, some events, which have traditionally been held in previous years, were not held at all this time, or if scheduled, were canceled. There was no hacking contest, something which needs long lead time to adequately prepare. The trivia contest was squeezed out of the schedule. A short movie was supposed to be shown, but was not shown after all. The Hamakor Prize was not given this year. There was no booth with technical books sold by Combooks, even though they donated some books to the event.
The most important parts of the event – the panels about Free Software in education and Free Software in business – were held.
In my particular area of responsibility, there was some activity, which was triggered by people with disabilities having pre-registered to the event almost at the last moment. A blind man asked for an escort, and thanks to an extra mile from two of the event’s organizers (Shachar Shemesh and Sagiv Barhoom), he was provided with transportation and escort without my having to do anything more difficult than few E-mail messages. There was also an hard-of-hearing guy, and it can be said that he was screwed by not having registered earlier. During the time I knew I will be the only one needing a notetaker for the conference, I did not bother to inspect the hall as it did not matter to me where the notetaker, laptop and me will sit. However, once we had to serve also an hard-of-hearing person, we should have sat near the podium rather than the far end of the hall. The shortage of time also did not allow me to arrange for a FM assistive listening system for the event, but this was OK, because the guy could cope if he sat near the lecturers (which he did).
I still have some homework to do – arrange for the conference’s presentations to find their way to the blind guy (the second accessibility provision which he asked for), edit the notetaker’s transcript, and post it on the Wiki for other people to review it, fill in missing information, correct errors – and finally use it to help caption the short movie planned by Ram-on Agmon to commemorate the event.
