DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Wednesday, 26 December 2018 at 11:26:52 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> Went to bike there for 9 days (800km), to arrive the day before 
> DConf.
> Munich was a beautiful city but Switzerland was very graphic.
> Friends jokingly said it was a D pilgrimage and it was, kind of 
> :)

You could still have done that if the conference format was 
altered to increase in-person interaction!

> Putting a face on people you've known from the internet is 
> really surprising.

You would get MORE of that if the conference format was altered 
to increase in-person interaction.

Keep in mind that what I want to do is to tweak dconf, not to 
kill it. Change from 50 minute talk to 30 minute talk + 20 minute 
interaction, in at least some cases.

Or it might be fun to reconfigure a day: have all the day's 
speakers do 15 minute initial talks and pass out "learn more" 
links. Then we have a *two hour* lunch/mingling break which gives 
everyone a chance to digest the morning's information, look into 
the learn more stuff, form ad-hoc study groups, etc.

Then, after lunch, the speakers return for follow up stuff. Talk 
part 2, public Q&A, whatever, using the remaining 25 mins each of 
their time.


I'm open to a lot of ideas... I just want to spend more of the 
in-hours time doing in-person interaction.


> My only regret was not sleeping at the hotel since you don't 
> get as many occasions to meet people in a beer settings.

And again, a huge point I have been trying to make is we could 
get MORE of that if we tweaked the format!

Most everyone cites their favorite and most productive part of 
in-person meetings are actually the after hours stuff. (I hear 
this both from dconf and my day job - this is part of why it hits 
me so much, but the day job has been doing some tweaks this last 
year, to great success - I *know* these changes are for the 
better.)

So why not take some of the after-hours wins into the main event?

Going backwards to this:

> The talks were honestly all interesting, probably being there 
> puts you in the mood to really get into them.

Well, wouldn't it be fun to be able to talk about them or work 
with the ideas more in person?!

With my compromise proposals, you'd still get much of the same 
talk... just use a fraction of the remaining time to interact 
with everyone and their code directly.