Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Geek retreats

I've been a computer geek for most of my life, and self-employed for just over a year. Being self-employed means that you have to spend more or less all your time worrying about getting work done, unless you're one of those geeks who's lucky enough to be able to turn down work because you're making quite a nice enough living already. Heavens, most full-time-employed geeks also have problems stopping thinking about computers a lot of the time.

As a result of this, many geeks get all twitchy and alarmed when it's suggested that they should take a holiday or go somewhere where there's a risk of Internet connectivity being limited or unavailable. Apart from that, traditional holiday resorts - sun, sand and sangria - have not historically appealed very much to the dedicated computer geek, in my experience. As a result of this, it seems to me that many geeks either never take any holidays at all, or take holidays spent at home so they can play with computers in peace and quiet.

The other side of the coin is that many people today do basically all of their work over the Internet. With a laptop and an Internet connection, it's possible to work from just about anywhere - you'll regularly see people with headphones on working from local cafés or from hotels or wherever. Unfortunately, most of the places where wireless access is readily and predictably available are fairly boring - cafés, business hotels, some guesthouses. Some resorts will have internet access available in the lobby and maybe in rooms, but it's not always reliable, it's sometimes expensive and it rarely extends as far as the beach. Anyway, hotel rooms never have enough power points available, do they?

IT workers also tend to have (by no means inevitably, but often) rather more disposable income than the average worker. They can easily afford to take time away from home or go on holiday, and in many cases they can take a laptop along and be able to keep working on whatever it is they need to work on - or whatever they find interesting. A lot of people do this stuff for fun as well.

In theory, there are plenty of people who could take a couple of weeks away to go and sit by the sea with a PowerBook, getting on with work while still being able to get away from it all and enjoy a break from the norm. Indeed, an annual "retreat" of some form has been used by a lot of senior managers and the like for a long time as a way to focus on what they want to do away from the distractions of day-to-day life. Unfortunately, for people who aren't rich enough to afford their own well-wired mountain hideaway or beach house, this generally isn't a possibility. Conventional holiday resorts just don't cater well to the geek market - they're usually more about consumption of enormous amounts of alcohol (not that there's anything wrong with that) and large numbers of families, which means screaming children and other distractions for people who want to concentrate on intellectual pursuits even while they're away from home. And as mentioned above, they don't generally have good Internet access.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that what the world needs is a purpose-built Geek Retreat, or a holiday resort catering to IT workers who either want a working holiday, to take some time away from home or the office to learn about new things, or to work together with others in an atmosphere that makes it easy to do so while still being able to have some fun if that's what's wanted. After all, it should be possible given current technology to sit at a table on a palm-fringed beach at dusk drinking wine... while still being able to work on that piece of code you've been trying to find the time to finish off for the last month. It should be possible to gather with other people to work on stuff in a quiet corner, then be able to go out for a swim afterwards or a run along the beach. It should also be possible for such a place to have comprehensive broadband wireless Internet access covering every square metre of the site, and power points available even at those tables on the beach. It should be possible to spend one day tackling a particularly irritating problem in Perl, and the next day learning to dive.

It should be possible for such a place to have geek-friendly rooms with plenty of power points and external keyboards and monitors available for a little extra comfort. It should be possible for such a place to have on-site hardware support, a well-stocked reference library on site so you don't have to bring a pile of O'Reillys and lots of opportunities for networking with other people (a lot like the "hallway track" at major conferences like LISA and SANE. It should be possible for companies to send groups of employees for a couple of weeks to get their heads down for some serious coding away from the office, but still with everything they need to do their work on site.

I think such a place would cater to a lot of people - from lone workers looking for a place to get some peace and quiet at the same time as being able to enjoy themselves when they want to, from disparate groups of people gathering to work on a particular project, right through to people who just want to take a holiday but want to take a holiday in a uniquely geek-friendly environment. Special events could be organised - masterclasses and courses similiar to those on the existing geek cruises, but with a less claustrophobic environment and far better computing resources available on site (not to mention proper Internet access).

Unfortunately, I haven't got the cash to hand to develop this idea myself, but if anyone feels like lending me the capital I'm pretty sure that such a venture would be a huge success. There would be various pitfalls and risks and areas where very careful design and marketing would be necessary in the initial stages, but I have some other ideas which I think would address most of these. (You don't market to geeks directly, for starters. Oh gosh no, you don't. That way lies Certain Doom.)

What do you think, massed brains of The Internet? Could a geeky version of Club Med be a viable project?

Posted by mpk at August 10, 2005 2:51 PM