Last 4 days I spent at Hacking At Random, a festival for hackers held here in the Netherlands and I really enjoyed everything that was going on there. The atmosphere was great and I had great conversations with a lot of people from all over the world. This time, I really liked that a small project was born amongst the people I was with (mainly pruts.nl members). At the festival, visitors had the ability to register their DECT telephone to Eventphone, so you could use your own phone to call other visitors and even call to the outside world. More than 800 visitors (out of 2200) had their phone registered which made meeting people very easy. Next to using a DECT phone, you were also able to hookup SIP enabled stuff to the telephony network.
Since we wanted to stimulate social interaction at the festival, we set up an Asterisk server and connected it to the telephony network via SIP. Then we took the whole address book that is published by Eventphone and put it in a database. After writing some scripts, we had the possibility to randomly select a phone extension and call this. After listening to an announcement, the call was put into a conference call. Since not all phones were connected and not everybody picked up, we participated in the calls sometimes, to keep things alive. Normally a person would pick up the phone and we'd pretend that we were also randomly called, so that an actual conversation was held. When more people picked up and added to the call, we stopped talking and let the others (mostly 2) people have their conversation.
The nice thing about this was that everybody reacted in a very positive way. People who were called and also the (not so many) people we told what we were up to were all enthusiastic by the whole thing.
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