Before doing Ignite Portland 3, we need to figure out what to do about
registration, because that turned out to be a roadblock. The decision to
stop mandatory registrations was a very good one. The registration
system's logs showed that we were registering an average of 10 people a
minute, but with 700 people, it'd take nearly two hours to register
everyone.

We can calculate the number of computers we'll need for future events
with a calculation like this: (700 expected event attendees * 40 seconds
per registration) / (30 minutes as the desired amount of time to
register everyone * 60 seconds in a minute) = about 16 registration
computers given that situation. We had far fewer computers than that.

Another problem was that the registration computers were sharing the
Internet connection with everyone else at the event, and were struggling
to get enough bandwidth to talk with the web server providing the
registration program. A solution to this problem would be to setup a
local WiFi mesh just for the registration systems and let them talk to a
local server on the premises, thus avoiding slow Internet access.

However, something else we may want to serious consider next time are
tickets. Folks can register ahead of time and print out tickets
featuring a cryptographic code that uniquely identifies that ticket, to
prevent them from forging or photocopying them. We open the doors early
and let only those with tickets in, scan these to validate the ticket's
legitimacy and mark the people as present. At a later time in the
evening, we open the doors to everyone, regardless of whether they have
a ticket, and keep letting them in until we run out of room. This could
dramatically speed up the registration process and make it a bit more
fair to those that registered ahead of time, but would also add a layer
of technical and social complexity.

Thoughts?

-igal