Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives

[Joakim]

I'm sure some thought and planning is now going into the next 
DConf, so I'd like to make sure people are aware that the 
conference format that DConf uses is dying off, as explained here:

https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era

There was a discussion about this in a previous forum thread:

https://forum.dlang.org/post/bnbldtdfeppzjuthxdxa@forum.dlang.org

Jonathan and Mike argue in that thread that DConf is great for 
the core team to get together in person and hash things out for D 
with very high-bandwidth interaction, but I pointed out that 
doesn't justify 95%+ of the attendees being there. If there's a 
real need for this, maybe get those 8-15 people together in an 
online video conference or offline retreat, without a bunch of 
hangers-on and talks.

People are now experimenting with what replaces conferences, we 
should be doing that too. I came up with some ideas in that 
thread:

"Have most talks prerecorded by the speaker on their webcam or 
smartphone, which produce excellent video these days with not 
much fiddling, and have a couple organizers work with them to get 
those home-brewed videos up to a certain quality level, both in 
content and presentation, before posting them online."

I volunteer to help presenters do this.

"Once the videos are all up, set up weekend meetups in several 
cities [all over the world], where a few livestreamed talks may 
talk place if some speakers don't want to spend more time 
producing a pre-recorded talk, but most time is spent like the 
hackathon, discussing various existing issues from bugzilla in 
smaller groups or brainstorming ideas, designs, and libraries for 
the future."

I can setup an event like this in my city, where AFAIK nobody 
uses D, so most of it would be geared towards introducing them to 
the language.

I estimate that you could do ten times better at raising 
awareness and uptake with this approach than the current DConf 
format, by casting a much wider net, and it would cost about 10X 
less, ie you get two orders of magnitude better bang for the buck.

At the very least, DConf should just be a big hackathon of 
self-organizing groups, rather than wasting any time passively 
imbibing talks next to a hundred other people. I still don't 
think the cost of getting a hundred people in the same room for 
3-4 days would be justified, but at least it would be a step in 
the right direction.