NORDUnet Conference in Norway

[Written 12 October 2012]

Last year, when I was still in a mood to say ‘yes’ to most everything, I agreed to be on the ‘Program Committee‘ of the 27th NORDUnet Conference, to be held in Oslo on 18-20 September 2012, serving as the ‘Icelandic delegate’.  (NORDUnet is: “a joint collaboration by the 5 Nordic National Research and Education Networks in Denmark (Forskningsnettet), Finland (Funet), Iceland (RHnet), Norway (Uninett) and Sweden (SUNET) and operates a world-class Nordic and International network and eInfrastructure service for the Nordic research and educational community.”)

I am of course pretty clueless about both networks and eInfrastructure, but probably know more than the average Joanne, so I figured I’d say yes and see what would happen.  Mostly I got to meet interesting and pretty cool people, read over a few abstracts, but most importantly, travel for free twice to Oslo, and once to Copenhagen, neither of which I’d ever visited before!

Anyway, fast forward a year from saying yes, and the conference itself was about to begin.  One of my duties as an organizer was to ‘chair’ a couple of sessions (The Data Deluge, and Campus Issues 1) so to Oslo I went.  (Being a ‘chair’ means you introduce the next speaker, and then watch the clock and tell them when time is running out.  That’s it.)

Monday 17 September 2012

For a span of 24 hours Finnur was in England and I was in Norway, and the kids were in Iceland! Thank goodness for grandparents!! 🙂