I’m off to SAP TechEd this week in Basel. Fantastic. It was a bit of a bumpy start – the online-registration process was a bit of a shambles, and I had to ring up to complete the transaction as the webpage (javascript?) was broken. Not a good advert for web-based commerce, is it? Anyway, after 3 (!)separate phone calls to the registration company I finally got the details I needed, and I’m off on the train via Koeln tomorrow down to Basel.

As an attendee of other technical events, for example O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, I’ve become used to expecting wireless ‘net access. One of the great things about attending conferences and meeting like-minded people is that there’s a ton of social interaction and collaboration that goes on in parallel to the actual sessions, presentations and stalls.

With that in mind, and presuming that there will be ‘net access, I’ve set up an IRC channel ‘#teched’ on gnu.pipetree.com (port 6667) – the IRC server is password protected – specify ‘teched’ as the password when you connect. There you can log on and discuss aspects of SAP technology as presented and discussed during the sessions and presentations. The collaboration is facilitated by that killer-app of IRC, the Daily Chump bot. It sits in an IRC channel and helps you collate links and comments into a dynamic weblog. For more information, see the Chump’s documentation (at the link above). An example of the Chump at work can be seen at the RDF Interest Group’s collective blog.

So if you’re interested in finding a place to chat about things and log things of interest with comments, you’re welcome to the #teched channel and the use of the Chump bot.

Any questions, just ask!

Originally published on SAP Community