There are far too many conferences offering wifi to all participants for me to be convinced that this is an economic deal-breaker for ITI.

A few years back, I wrote a little paper called, “If Information Wants to be Free, who’s Going to Pay for it.” http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may00/kaser/05kaser.html

You don’t have to tell me how great free wireless is, since I’m constantly working from remote locations, often with my laptop balanced on a window ledge to steal someone’s open access link. But the point I was making in that Y2K paper still applies. For something to be free, someone has to pay.

My understanding is that the hotels where we hold our events want to charge us a fee for each person in order to make wireless available.

Now take $29 a day (or whatever egregious rate the hotel wants to charge) and multiply it times 2000 people, times 3 days and you can see why we might not be able to pay that, and still charge a registration fee that our attendees would find reasonable.

I’m not convinced that if we paid that fee anywhere near 2000 people would take advantage of it. Nor am I convined it would actually work, since most hotels were not designed with this technology in mind.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m with you. I’d like to make that happen. And hopefully one day we will be able to give you an entirely wireless conference experience.

In the meantime, we’d like to give you something that we can give you. A sandbox.

You don’t have to play in the Swift sandbox if you don’t want to. In fact, your decision not to participate, tells us something important about our need to provide a Web 2.0 platform for our delegates (something that others have suggested to us. with as much fervor as you are going after wireless).

The Swift experiment is giving ITI an opportunity to decide whether providing our attendees with Web 2.0 stuff is something they want to do, without our having to invest in inventing the platform.

You’ve made a rather convincing argument that you don’t really need anything special. You can just use the tools you’ve already got. Great feedback! If nothing else, maybe this trial will provide me with the ability to cross off one expressed user expectation from the development list.

But our decision not to do 2.0 stuff for our conference goers will not result in a decision to provide free wireless. There is no comparison in the economic models.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content