#NetAcad taking part in the Wingsforlifeworldrun #worldrun
I am Nathan, I was one of the five persons of the Cisco Network Academy team who reported from the Wings For Life World Control Center in Spielberg. I blogged, twittered and facebooked about all the technical things that were happening behind the scenes.
When I got the first e-mail from Dominik Engel who is my coordinator in the Fachhochschule in Salzburg, I had no idea what exactly I would need to do for the Cisco Networking Academy at the Wings for Life World Run Global Control Center. But after some research on this event, I knew it would be really great to participate. I immediately answered him that I was interested in participating. When he brought me in contact with Jutta Jerlich from Cisco, she explained me what exactly our tasks were at the event and it became more and more interesting.
Our Cisco NetAcad team consisted of people from all over the world, me and Kevin are from Belgium, Felix and Maximilian are from Austria and Ivica is from Croatia. Me, Kevin and Maximilian are students, Felix and Ivica are already working. So we had people from different backgrounds and different countries in our team. This was exciting because everyone had another point of view and another way of working.
It was a great experience for us to be part of this event because we had 3 perspectives over this whole event. We were following the Livestream on our computer, we were also taking interviews of the people who made this event possible and our office was in the middle of the Global Race Control Center, so we could see how the professionals reacted to problems and how they solved them.
What I noticed about the crew working at the Global Race Control Center is their motivation and commitment to make this event successful. We could ask any question to anyone, they always answered our questions. I learned a lot during this event.
Participating in this event meant a lot to me. I am more motivated to keep on learning about networks and everything around this subject. It was very interesting to talk with the people who made the network for the event.
It is a big difference designing and configuring a network for an event than making a network for a company. When you design the network of a company, you can first investigate the needs of the company, and you are almost sure that while you are implementing your network, you will have enough devices, switchports, cables, etc. But if you make a network for an event, this is all different. You will need to rely on the meetings you had with the organization to know what is all needed for the event. But when you get to the event place, everything can change. This is what happened at the Global Race Control Center. They were working on designing the network for one week. But when they got at the event, they needed extra switchports and extra devices, so they worked for 2 more days at the event to meet all needs.
The way we let the world know about our findings was also really interesting, I learned how to make good blog posts and how to twitter. Before this event I had never twittered. The communication with the Cisco Network Academy was fluently and it was great that they helped us sharing all our findings on their global Facebook and twitter page. To notice that the things that me and my teammates wrote got shared all over the internet was really special.
It was great being a part of this big event. It gave an indescribable feeling when we were in the room with the staff and saw on the 34 screens that all the participants all over the world starting running at the same time. You could feel the joy and the happiness in the air.
Next year the Wings for Live World Run will be organized again and it would be great to participate again.