Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 14:49:31 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>
>> "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.
>
> I think this is something that could be done *in addition to* 
> DConf.

It depends what you mean by that. If DConf keeps running as it 
has, as you suggest below, but you simply add some satellite 
meetups around it in other cities watching the livestreamed talks 
from the main DConf, then you have addressed some of these 
concerns, but not very much.

If you go the decentralized approach I suggested, but maybe pick 
one of those locations as the one the core team goes to and don't 
do almost any in-person talks anywhere, that would address much 
more.

> I honestly don't think DConf is very effective at promoting D, 
> except perhaps to a small sliver of the overall population of 
> programmers, due to the content of most of the presentations.

I agree. I'll go farther and say that it's a small sliver of 
existing D programmers too who get much value out of it.

> {This is not intended to be a criticism or a statement that 
> anything about DConf should be changed.}

Heh, of course it's a criticism and of course it should be 
changed. :)

> I believe it would be a mistake to drop DConf. If we did that, 
> the story that would be told is "D couldn't even support its 
> own conference. Use Rust or Go or Julia instead." Our view 
> would be "we're on the cutting edge" but everyone else's view 
> would be "the language is dying".

Great. Everybody thought Apple was nuts when they released a $500 
iPhone in 2007, now Ballmer wishes he'd come up with the idea:

https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/07/former-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-wrong-iphone/

As long as you communicate that you're replacing one DConf 
location with several and why you're doing it, I don't see why we 
should care how they end up interpreting it. Our goal is to get 
users and adoption, not to look good to other 
programming-language developers.