DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Friday, 28 December 2018 at 07:08:19 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
> While I admire your persistence I fail to understand why you 
> simply don't ignore stuff you do not like. If you do not like 
> conferences fine - do not go there, and let us who do like them 
> and think they are useful have some fun!

Some of us want to improve things for everyone else, too.

Isn't that what open source is all about? We do it initially 
because it works for us, but then share it because it helps the 
community as well.

If you actually tried these improvements, you'd probably like 
them. Even our conservative managers at the day job have 
responded positively to similar changes we made over the last 
year.

We're a predominately remote organization and used to have 
org-wide in-person meetings that worked very much like dconf does 
now - someone would be designated to rattle off about a 
powerpoint while everyone else passively watches.

For last year's meeting, my manager (the team I'm on has done our 
meetings differently for a while) convinced the CEO to try a more 
interactive approach for the org-wide meeting too. We did that 
speaker intro, small random group work, whole group conclusion 
pattern.

It was a success. Everyone was more engaged, we had more 
cross-team collaboration (which has continued throughout the year 
as people are more comfortable with each other!), and people have 
shown better retention of the material. Staff surveys about 
subjective feelings about this meeting were up, too, people said 
it is more enjoyable.

And this shouldn't be a surprise! We find in education that using 
a variety of teaching strategies and getting students hands-on 
and working together almost always leads to better outcomes.


Of course, most people STILL say their favorite part was the 
after-hours chats... but I say that's because the in-hours stuff 
was still basically work :P

But I'm telling you, DConf can learn from this stuff. Joakim is 
doing the community a service by trying to get you all to try 
some changes. Even baby step compromises can yield results at low 
risk.