Sadly, a trip to San Antonio just isn’t in the cards for me this June. One day I’ll make it to NECC, but it looks like it isn’t going to be in 2008.

I was feeling a little left out, with all the excited twittering about it — and I’m sure this will come to a maddening cacophony in the next two weeks — until I ran across this post by Steve Dembo a week or so ago.

This morning, I stopped by the NECC 2008 Ning, and was pretty excited to see that the groundwork is being laid for this to become a reality!

While I am amazed, I’m also thrilled to see that Open PD is developing a life of its own in our field.

I wonder how long it will be before this deeply impacts the factors considered as educational technology conferences are scheduled in the future. It seems ironic to attend an ed tech session and not be able to get a wireless signal, but such was the case in late April right here in the Chicago suburbs.

As recently as last year, a rather large event (one option of many offered by a big school district on an institute day) had to be moved to another convention center the DAY before the event because it was suddenly discovered that the original venue had no internet access outside of their own business office! (How do you stay in business?)

I wonder if these things cross the minds of people who own or manage reception halls and the like. Do they know how simple it is to provide wireless access in their public areas? Providing bandwidth that makes it possible to live stream multiple sessions may soon be a determining factor in which locations are considered for our field. Has anyone told them?