Western Cape Jamborees: 1995 Report
Sea Point: Scout & Guide Awareness Day
After months of planning by a small committee of us, led by DC CW12 Alistair Brickhill, Scout Awareness Day Saturday 9 December 1995 eventually arrived. The whole aim of the day was to make people of Cape Town more aware of the existence of Scouts and Guides. Friday evening saw stalls and displays going up according to a monstrous layout plan, on the open lawn area beach front at Three Anchor Bay. Some of us stayed the night to guard all the equipment.
Saturday dawned sunny, breezy and warm, to end in a cold howling South Easter, taking much of our equipment into the sea by days end. There were over 40 food stalls along with static displays and live entertainment of bands, dog shows, pioneering action, trek-cart course and others. Our Scout yacht Rotary was anchored out in the bay and those who were brave enough, swam from Sea Point Pavilion to Three Anchor Bay Cove to amuse the crowds and for various prizes.
The entire event was well supported by our entire Scouting fraternity from as far as Worcester and Hermanus, but outside civilian crowds expected just never seemed to arrive in great numbers, even with radio advertising and others. In the end we ran at a huge loss, in addition having to actually pay Cape City Council a substantial amount for the use of the ground as well, BUT… even with this and the wind, all who attended had a fantastic day together with lots to eat, watch and do.
André Foot (one of the organisers)
Cybertent Report
By Ian Webb
The Cybertent concept was inspired by JOTnet and the Australian Cyberspace Jamboree. The planning began at the first meeting for the Scout and Guide Awareness Day in May 1995. At this stage a venue and date were already set: 9 December 1995, on the grassy area along the Sea Point beachfront. Of course this presented major technical problems as there was no power or phone line within reach at that stage... Early on we secured Telkom's interest through their Social Investment department, and I was fortunate to meet Hamish Whittal from Computer Alliance (CA) who immediately offered to supply the hardware and help with the technical side. These two contacts were indispensable and I believe the whole Cybertent project would have been impossible without their involvement. By December we had arranged the details: power could be obtained from a meter box on the beachfront, CA would supply six Compaq 486DX2 66 machines with Ethernet cards as well as a hub and router, and Telkom would connect us with a 64K Diginet line to SAIX, their newly-launched internet service provider. The organisers of the Scout and Guide Awareness Day would provide a 5m x 5m army tent. Kevin van Blerk of SAIX also offered to help at the tent itself. The Scout team was made up of myself (Ian Webb) and Bruce Dixie. Shaun O'Meara joined us on the day.
The day before the Cybertent we spent most of the morning on the phone to Telkom and CA arranging times to meet the phone-line installation people and when to pick up the computers. At the last minute we had to agree to paying R500 to insure the machines for the day: R82000 worth of equipment! Then we picked up the machines and had to take them apart to read off the serial numbers from the Ethernet cards and install the RAM. Fortunately Hamish from CA had installed Win95 and Netscape on all of them the night before. He had been up until after 3 a.m. When the PCs got to Sea Point at 3 p.m., the 64K phone line was there but no tent and no electricity. Bruce managed to arrange the power, in the process running up a huge bill on a cell phone. The tent arrived at 6:30 p.m. by which time we'd set up a few machines in another tent and discovered that the router on our end of the phone line wasn't talking to the router on the far end, so Hamish set off to get another while we moved into a big 5m x 5m army tent and set up lights, power and a little Ethernet with the 6 machines. We had some problems with the UPS and eventually stopped using it. Fortunately the power supply was reliable.
By 3 a.m. Hamish and Kevin were still trying to configure the new router and we'd eaten several pizzas, but still no luck in contacting the outside world. We called it a night at about 4 a.m. to sleep until 6:30.
When Hamish arrived much refreshed we spent some more time trying to set it up again and suddenly at 8:15 we got through to home.netscape.com - great excitement! IRC and Netscape were soon up and running, and we had our first rush of Scouts as the Scout Awareness Day began to take shape. Then the tent next door pulled our plug to plug in their urn, which caused a bit of excitement until we sorted it out... We had a huge crowd of Scouts and visitors all day, ranging from 12 to 30 at a time in the tent. IRC proved the most popular, and we took over #scouting for most of the day. Initially we had some problems with the Scouts generally insulting each other and everyone on the channel, but we managed to get that under control by judiciously kicking off one or two people and playing Cyber-Scoutmaster. Mail and News never really made it off the ground, but Netscape was very popular, although it proved quite hard to keep the visitors to Scouting sites. Later Kevin brought in his PC, all set up for multimedia, and we ran Internet Phone on it. We had a few conversations with people in Oklahoma and Taiwan, much to the surprise of the people in the Radio Ham tent nearby. At about 3 p.m. the crowds were still visiting and keeping the tent busy, but the South Easter was coming up and some other stalls were closing, so we started encouraging people to leave. We closed the tent just before the whole thing blew down... In all a most dramatic end to a successful project!