This week I am recollecting what services I enjoyed at past conferences, and perhaps more importantly, what services I would like them to have but they didn’t. By “services”, I mean things that are mostly for the convenience of the attendees. Traditional things like “local maps” and “unlimited supply of bottled water” (*) are in this category, but specialties like “a blog set up for the conference” are also OK. (AAAI did it.)
Note that I am *not* in charge of the Local Arrangements of FOCS 2005, so I can’t guarantee anything. But I can guarantee that your inputs will be heard. In fact, I imagine such a list can be useful to organizers of any conference, so consider my posting of this right before FOCS merely a coincidence. 
To make this post extensible, I guess I am going to use the threaded-comments feature and post my day-dreaming one at a time. Please feel free to chip-in yours. It can only make better conferences.
Note also that there is an RSS feed for the comments on this site, so you don’t have to come back to check the comments.
(*) I don’t necessarily think the latter is a good thing due to environmental concerns, but it does have its appeal over cups… Plus, the hotel may not like the idea unless you order from them at their price…
Printer
Some last-minute things like an updated itinerary, or simply driving directions to a local restaurant.
I also note that most hotels have business centers that can let you print (often with a per-page charge though).
Ethernet Cable (for Sale)
This year SPAA was in a resort hotel that doesn’t have wireless. Instead we had in-room Ethernet. But what if you don’t have an Ethernet cable? The hotel frontdesk didn’t have any spare ones either. I was lucky to have mine in my travel pack.
I heard that FOCS’s hotel has wireless service. So maybe this is not going to be a problem for FOCS.
Electronic Proceedings
I know this is a “dangerous” topic. But speaking as an attendee, I really prefer not having to haul that big book all day long for three days. If copyright issues can be handled properly, then having all the papers on a CD would be really nice.
Another way to do it is to post the PDFs to a password-protected website and distribute the password during the conference. Then I can just download them all to my harddisk the night before. Something like that.
I don’t see what copyright issues there are to handle… At ETAPS ’03, everyone got the proceedings on CD. (The students, like me, got only the CD; everyone else had to haul the books around.)
Aside to whoever’s managing the FOCS travel page: the Greyhound station at 11th/Liberty is *closed* (for renovation); the temporary station is out on Second Ave, east of the jail.
Power, power, power!
My tablet lasts around six hours…not quite enough to cover an entire conference of notetaking.
Good point. I remember at FCRC some people had to “fight” for electricity outlets. I will note this when we prepare the FOCS scene on Saturday.