DConf Online 2020 (Soft Announcement)

[Mike Parker]

DConf Online 2020 is on!

https://dconf.org/2020/online/index.html

Please note that this is a soft announcement. Please don't share 
the website or the announcement on social media just yet. I want 
to have a chance to revise the details if needed before we do 
that. I'll publish a blog post next week with a more formal 
announcement and will share that to the world at large.

Some brief notes about how we currently envision things:

* Pre-recorded talks will be scheduled to premiere at specific 
times on our YouTube channel on Saturday and Sunday.
* Speakers in the pre-recorded talks will need to be available 
for a livestream Q & A session that will run in parallel to the 
talk and for an additional 15 minutes beyond. We'll monitor 
multiple sources in addition for questions (the chat in the video 
premier, the Q & A livestream chat, slack, discord, IRC).
* If you have ever done any livecoding and enjoy it, please 
consider proposing a session for DConf. I'll set up a restreamer 
so that you can stream to both your channel of preference and the 
foundation's YouTube channel. You'll need to know ahead of time 
what your goals for the session are and how you'll achieve them. 
If we can have at least one session per day, we'll be very happy.
* We'll have at least one livestreamed panel (the traditional Ask 
use Anything) and are eagerly looking for interesting panel ideas.
* I'm hoping to convince a handful of people to organize and run 
a #BeerConf starting the day before the conference (Friday the 
20th) and going through Sunday.
* Currently planning to kick off around 3:00 PM UTC on Saturday 
and Sunday so that folks on the US West Coast don't have to get 
up before sunrise to participate. Those of us in Asia will have 
to make do.

As the web page says, after the event we'll be launching a new 
playlist on the foundation's YouTube channel (The D Community 
Presents). It's our goal to accept as many of the DConf 
submissions as possible since we aren't physically constrained by 
time and space. We want to post *every* pre-recorded talk to 
YouTube. Those we don't select to premiere for the conference we 
can instead post once a week to the new playlist afterward. And 
we'll continue to accept submissions to the playlist as time goes 
by.

And yes, we hope to make this an annual event. Real-world DConf 
in May, online DConf in November.

Please let me know if anything about the submission process is 
unclear and I'll update the page. I do not want to post details 
about the process of prepping the videos; I'm reserving that for 
those who are actually accepted. And I'm holding off on the 
details of exactly how we'll be doing the livestreaming, as that 
may change. We'll make some test runs to ensure that everything 
we want to do actually works and I'll update the page as we get 
closer to the dates.