Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives

Nicholas Wilson iamthewilsonator at hotmail.com
Tue Oct 2 10:37:44 UTC 2018


On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> 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.

As I'm sure has been said before, if it were just the talks it 
probably wouldn't be worth it. But conferences are sooooooooooo 
much more than just the talks. Its the conversations over 
breakfast/lunch/dinner/ between talks and long into the night 
(sometimes too long). Its the networking, the hacking, the face 
to face. The talks are usually pretty good too.

The conference is definitely not dead, I'm going to one in San 
José in 2 weeks, sure the talks look really interesting but the 
main reason is to talk to other people to get stuff done.


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