I had a great time at DySPAN in Aachen last week, and there was lots of talk about the state not only of DySPAN but of its related technologies. There was a lot of attention paid to the state of DSA (dynamic spectrum access) devices and their theoretical/research aspects in general, but we also talked a lot about the role and state of cognitive radios and software radios. A number of follow up posts will, I'm sure, be dealing with these questions.
Also, my good friend and former boss Linda Doyle has written a number of great discussion pieces on her blog. So if you want to get a feel for some of the subtext and conversations happening during the conference, head there.
Part of the conversation at DySPAN took place over Twitter. Keith Nolan and I tried this during DySPAN 2008 in Chicago, including a live feed on a monitor in the demo room, but at the time, it was a bit premature for the attendees to really get in to. This year, though, we had some great actvity over Twitter, even though I was more silent than usual. I think the computer science and IT conference world have already caught on to the use of social networking like Twitter to enhance their conferences, but this was the first time that I had really felt like it was part of the overall tenor of this event.
The Friday morning panel sessions really got us going, probably due to the energy the panels and moderators brought to the day. We as the audience responded to them by actively participating in the backchannel on Twitter. It not only served as an incubation room for developing some ideas, but it will also be there as a record of what was happening and (at least a part of) the audience's reactions.