I spent last week in Washington, DC, cartoon-blogging NTEN’s 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference. These are some of the highlights.

You can’t have a tech conference without WiFi becoming an issue, unless you take extraordinary measures. It really doesn’t help if the venue is underground, as a lot of large convention centres are, making it a lot harder to connect even to a cellular signal – my own Internet-of-last-resort. (Although it’s actually getting pretty tolerable. I’m tethered right now, and while there’s no question it’s slower, I can definitely get stuff done.)

Was it a blessing in diguise? Maybe. It freed us to look at the people right next to us, to really look at them, and to talk with them. To share our hopes (“Try deleting your network preferences”), our dreams (“I’ve heard of a conference where the WiFi was actually pretty good”), even our innermost spirituality (“Maybe the IP address gods will smile on us”).