UC BackChannel is Live

Today we went live with a beta version of the UC BackChannel site, so  I thought I’d share a little about what we’ve created. The goal was simple – create a web site just for the ESRI User Conference, something useful for attendees, something we’d like to have while we’re at the conference. Oh, and it had to be fun to build.

The ESRI UC is fun, but its immense. Ten-Thousand plus people all milling around, looking for sessions, friends, beer, food, not in that order. We also thought it would be fun to throw some competition into the mix, and what with all these gps-enabled smart phones with good browsers (iPhone + *some* Android devices) around, maybe they could play a part in this. What if we could encourage all sorts of people to get together in some sort of good natured game that leaves everyone with memorable photos with prominent members of the GIS/ESRI community? Well, that’s more or less what we’ve cooked up.

What’s in this BackChannel of which you speak?

The “BackChannel” itself

A “backchannel” at a tech conference is a real-time chat session, usually held on IRC. While IRC is great, it’s not the simplest thing to get going on, and so we cooked something pretty similar but it happily runs in your browser. What’s nice is that it’s much more real-time and interactive than just following a hash tag on twitter. These chat’s tend to be both informative and very funny, and we thought we’d like others to be able to easily join in. The screenshot below shows the desktop and mobile versions.

Schedule

The schedule app is just that – we’ve screen scraped the conference schedule (plenary, keynotes and tech sessions only, as an aside – did you know there are over 1000 scheduled items at the UC!?!?) as well as added in some additional after hours events (think #GeoGlobalDomination / TweetUps). Although not the most exciting app, here’s why I threw this in – I often go into a session because the title sounds interesting, only to find it’s not what I was looking for. This leaves me digging through the schedule trying to find the other sessions going on at that time. This app solves that problem by easily listing the current sessions. We’ve also added what we consider to me “must see” sessions – this is biased because we chose the list, but I’ll stand by it – ArcPy, Amazon Cloud, and Flex dominate this, but you should be on top of those things, so go see’em!

Photo Safari

Ok, now things get a little more interesting. This a photo scavenger hunt, but you’re tasked with getting your photo with various bloggers/tweeters and ESRI staffers. Once you’ve got the pic, log into the backchannel, upload it, and get points (more on the points in a moment). Ok, sounds good, but there are a couple of technical complexities with the mobile version. To be clear,  you can always upload your photos using a normal web browser, but mobile browsers have disabled the file upload control. Why? Who knows, but it does not work. However, for iPhone users, there is a work around. You can grab the QuickPic app from CliqCliq (it’s free) and the iPhone version of the site will use this app to upload photos. Android folks – you gotta use a normal browser to upload. As a fall back, just email your photos to your GMail account (you have a GMail account right?!?!) and then login at one of the notebooks in the message center at the UC, and upload the photo from there. Screen shots again…

Buzzword Bingo

‘Cuz you knew someone had to do this. Play along in any session and see how many current geo-buzzwords the speaker hits. Because you can easily “game” this one, it’s just one point per “bingo”, and you’ll only get awarded points once every 10 minutes.

Stumblr Live Map

This is kinda like 4Square, but without all that pesky privacy and control. Whenever you are out and about, just pop over to this page, and “check-in”. The mobile version uses the GeoLocation API to put you on the map, so it’s pretty simple. The map will show everyone’s check-ins that have occurred within the last 2 hours. Oh, we don’t actually show WHO you are on the map, but you do choose what you are doing, and your pin will be symbolized appropriately. You get 5 points per check-in, but are limited to 30 points per hour (you can check-in as many times as you want though)

About those points…

We also decided to give some stuff away. Not a random drawing sort of thing, nor squishy “stress balls” or other general conference “junk” swag. We want to give out some cool stuff. And who makes “cool stuff”? Apple. And what’s cooler than cool? an iPad. So, our goal is to give away 3 iPads – one of each of the wifi versions. The kicker is that in order to justify that, we need to have a lot of people using these apps. Thus, the prize packages are on a sliding scale.

(more info here: http://uc.dtsgis.com/home/prizes)

So, we’re hoping that this sort of a structure will get you to get all your friends (and random people you don’t know) into this swing of things. Also of note – although there will be DTS people using these apps, we will not be included in the ranking system (bummer for us, good for you!)

Other Swag

I thought this was a pretty cool setup, but Brian Noyle insisted that we have something tangible to hand out. So we will also be packing some other geo-swag. So if you see either of us (for instance at the TweetUp on Sunday evening at Dicks Last Resort from 6:00pm till?), come up, say hello and we’ll hook you up with something fun (until we run out!)

About the “beta” Version

At this point, for the desktop version everything is operational, but we are still debugging and adding in smaller things (polishing look and feel). On the mobile side of things we are still adding in missing pages (i.e. you can’t register on your iPhone or Android right now), but a lot of stuff is working. We launched it well before the UC so people can get the hang of how it works, report bugs (use the “Email Us” link in the footer) and get QuikPic installed on your iPhones. So you can play around with uploading photos etc etc, but of course all points will be zeroed our and all photos purged on Friday July 9th at midnight. From then until the conference closes at 4:00pm on Friday July 16th, it’s “game on”.

Fine Print and all that…

Prizes will be awarded after the conference. In the case of a tie in points, the ranking algorithm will put the user who got the points first, higher. Points for invalid or faked photos will be revoked. All prize awards will be at the discretion of DTS – play nice together, and we’ll all be just fine mmmkay?