I participated in a debate about providing or not Internet access in the conference rooms. The problem raised was that people just surf during talks, and this is not respectful.

My take was as follows. Instead of blaming the attendees for not being interested in the talk, make it the job of the presenter to attract the interest of the audience.

I argued that we should offer Internet access, but offer it only in the conference rooms. If it is not possible to have several wireless networks that only cover the conference rooms, we could just change the password at the beginning of each session and provide the password inside the rooms.

I see two reasons for offering internet only during conference talks and only in the conference rooms. First, you want people in the rooms during the talks. Second, you want people to talk during the coffee breaks.

Given that everyone will be in the conference room, I propose to use the Internet activity to measure the interestingness of the presentation. We could show on a display at the back of the room the amount of bits transferred over the network: the more bits, the worse the talk.

Perhaps the ideas above are too radical, but I do think we have to change dramatically how we approach presentations if we want to improve the state of facts significantly.