Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives

[Joakim]

On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 01:28:37 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On 10/2/18 4:34 AM, Joakim wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 09:39:14 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>>> On 10/1/18 11:26 PM, Joakim wrote:
>>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> I disagree.
>> 
>> It is not clear what you disagree with, since almost nothing 
>> you say has any bearing on my original post. To summarize, I 
>> suggest changing the currently talk-driven DConf format to 
>> either
>> 
>> 1. a more decentralized collection of meetups all over the 
>> world, where most of the talks are pre-recorded, and the focus 
>> is more on introducing new users to the language or
>> 
>> 2. at least ditching most of the talks at a DConf still held 
>> at a central location, maybe keeping only a couple panel 
>> discussions that benefit from an audience to ask questions, 
>> and spending most of the time like the hackathon at the last 
>> DConf, ie actually meeting in person.
>> 
>
> This point has a subtle flaw. Many of the talks raise points of 
> discussion that would otherwise go without discussion, and 
> potentially unnoticed, if it were not for the person bringing 
> it up. The talks routinely serve as a launchpad for the nightly 
> dinner sessions. Benjamin Thauts 2016 talk about shared 
> libraries is one such example. Indeed every single year has 
> brought at least one (but usually more) talk that opened up 
> some new line of investigation for the dinner discussions.

I thought it was pretty obvious from my original post, since I 
volunteered to help with the pre-recorded talks, but the idea is 
to have pre-recorded talks no matter whether DConf is held in a 
central location or not.

>> Since both of these alternatives I suggest are much more about 
>> in-person interaction, which is what you defend, and the only 
>> big change I propose is ditching the passive in-person talks, 
>> which you do not write a single word in your long post 
>> defending, I'm scratching my head about what you got out of my 
>> original post.
>> 
>>> There is much more to the conference than just a 4-day meetup 
>>> with talks. The idea that it's just the core 8-15 people with 
>>> a bunch of hangers-on is patently false. It's not about the 
>>> conversations I have with the "core" people. It's 
>>> Schveighoffer, or Atila, or Jonathan, or any of a long list 
>>> of people who are interested enough in coming. Remember these 
>>> people self-selected to invest non-trivial treasure to be 
>>> there, they  are ALL worthy of conversing with.
>> 
>> Since both my mooted alternatives give _much more_ opportunity 
>> for such interaction, I'm again scratching my head at your 
>> reaction.
>> 
>
> This is untrue. See responses further down.

It is true. You merely prefer certain interaction for yourself to 
the overall interaction of the community.

>>> Is it a "mini-vaction"? Yea, sure, for my wife. For her it's 
>>> a four day shopping spree in Europe. For me it's four days of 
>>> wall-to-wall action that leaves me drop-dead exhausted at the 
>>> end of the day.
>> 
>> So it's the talks that provide this or the in-person 
>> interaction? If the latter, why are you arguing against my 
>> pushing for more of it and ditching the in-person talks?
>> 
>
> It's everything. The talks, the coding, the talking, the 
> drinking. All of it has some social component I find valuable.

Please try to stay on the subject. Nobody's talking about getting 
rid of coding/talking/drinking, in fact, the idea is to have 
_more_ time for those, by ditching the in-person talks.

So the relevant info here would be what you find "social" about 
passively watching a talk in person with 100 other people in the 
same room, which as usual, you don't provide.

>>> Every time I see somebody predicting the end of "X" I roll my 
>>> eyes. I have a vivid memory of the rise of Skype and 
>>> videoconferencing in the early 2000's giving way to 
>>> breathless media reports about how said tools would kill the 
>>> airlines because people could just meet online for a trivial 
>>> fraction of the price.
>> 
>> People make stupid predictions all the time. Ignoring all such 
>> "end of" predictions because many predict badly would be like 
>> ignoring all new programming languages because 99% are bad. 
>> That means you'd never look at D.
>> 
>> And yes, some came true: almost nobody programs minicomputers 
>> or buys standalone mp3 players like the iPod anymore, compared 
>> to how many used to at their peak.
>> 
>
> Sure, but the predictions about videoconferencing have yet to 
> come true. As told but the data itself. The travel industry is 
> setting new records yearly in spite of videoconferencing. 
> That's not conjecture or opinion, go look for yourself. As I 
> have previously suggested, the stock prices and order-books of 
> Airbus and Boeing are are record highs. Airplanes are more 
> packed than ever (called load-factor). For example, Delta's 
> system-wide load-factor was 85.6% last year. Which means that 
> 85.6% of all available seats for the entire year were occupied. 
> (Source: 
> https://www.statista.com/statistics/221085/passenger-load-factor-of-delta-air-lines/). Airlines are delivering entire planes for business travelers.
>
> All of this demonstrates that videoconferencing has done 
> nothing to curb travel demand and the current data suggest that 
> it is unlikely too in the foreseeable future. That it might at 
> some point in the distant future is not relevant to this 
> discussion.

Yes, you know what is even more irrelevant to this discussion? 
Your entire unrelated tangent about business travel versus 
video-conferencing, which has essentially nothing to do with the 
topic of this thread, ie what a good format for DConf would be.

>>> However, it's 2018 and the airlines are reaping record 
>>> profits on the backs of business travelers (ask me how I 
>>> know). Airlines are even now flying planes with NO standard 
>>> economy seats for routes that cater specifically to business 
>>> travelers (e.g. Singapore Airlines A350-900ULR). The order 
>>> books (and stock prices) of both Airbus and Boeing are at 
>>> historic highs.
>> 
>> You know what is much higher? Business communication through 
>> email, video-conferencing, online source control, etc. that 
>> completely replaced old ways of doing things like business 
>> travel or sending physical packages. However, business travel 
>> might still be up- I don't know as I haven't seen the stats, 
>> and you provide nothing other than anecdotes- because all that 
>> virtual communication might have enabled much more 
>> collaboration and trade that also grew business travel 
>> somewhat.
>> 
>
> The reason I lump business and conference travel together is 
> because that is precisely how the travel industry defines it. 
> Primarily due to the fact that businesses pay for the 
> overwhelming majority of conference travel. You may disagree 
> with that characterization, but that is how it's defined.

Again a wholly irrelevant point, as who cares how they define it? 
Maybe if you presented some data on how the combined 
business/conference travel miles has gone up but you have none, 
and even then it would be spurious since we only care about the 
conference portion for this thread.

> And airlines kitting out entire airplanes for business travel 
> isn't an anecdote. It's a simple, and verifiable, fact that you 
> too could verify should you so choose. I provided you with all 
> the relevant data necessary to verify for yourself.

I see no data with which to "verify" it, another one of your 
weird prevarications.

>>> There are more conferences, attendees, and business travelers 
>>> than there has ever been in history, in spite of the great 
>>> technological leaps in videoconferencing technology in the 
>>> past two decades.
>>>
>>> The market has spoken. Reports of the death of 
>>> business/conference travel have been greatly exaggerated.
>> 
>> You are conflating two completely different markets here, 
>> business versus conference travel. Regarding conferences, your 
>> experience contradicts that of the iOS devs in the post I 
>> linked and the one he links as evidence, where that blogger 
>> notes several conferences that have shut down. In your field, 
>> it is my understanding that MS has been paring back and 
>> consolidating their conferences too, though I don't follow MS 
>> almost at all.
>> 
>
> Yes, some conferences shutdown, but many more started up. Your 
> premise is that "Popular Conference X was shutdown so all 
> conferences are dead forevars!"

No, try actually reading the links I mentioned, he lists 10 
Apple-related conferences that have shut down and says nothing 
has replaced them.

> In reality the attendance to conferences is going to depend on 
> the community it serves. For example, IOS has been getting 
> primarily cosmetic updates and bugfixes for the past few 
> cycles, but there really isn't much truly new tech that needs 
> to be communicated because what IOS does hasn't changed 
> significantly in years. In this case, a conference being moved 
> to a virtual environment with a limited number of presentations 
> my be the most effective course. This is not surprising, it is 
> the natural lifecycle of things.

Others report the same for other tech, including one guy in the 
comments there who runs a javascript conference in South Africa.

> For example, Microsoft killed PDC after 2008, only to bring 
> back a different, but related conference (Build) in 2011. Now 
> .NET has it's own virtual conference in Sept, but Build still 
> has a lot of .NET related content at Build, it's just the 
> Build's broader scope means that a lot of good content can't 
> make it in, so yea, virtual-conference for the content that 
> didn't make the cut. Microsoft took an incredible amount of 
> heat for canceling PDC. So they brought it back with a new name.

The point is that the MS ecosystem has been cutting back on 
conferences also, just as I said.

> But saying that because Apple did it for one of their 
> conferences (note that WWDC is still a thing) that all 
> conferences everywhere are dead is both prima facie ridiculous 
> and easily disproven.

No, what's easily disproven is that _nobody said it was only one 
conference that shut down_.

>>> The reason for this is fundamental to human psychology and, 
>>> as such, is unlikely to change in the future. Humans are 
>>> social animals, and no matter how hard we have tried, nothing 
>>> has been able to replace the face-to-face meeting for getting 
>>> things done. Be it the conversations we have over beers after 
>>> the talks, or the epic number of PR's that come out the 
>>> hackathon, or even mobbing the speaker after a talk.
>> 
>> It is funny that you say this on a forum where we're 
>> communicating despite never having met "face-to-face," 
>> discussing a language where 99.999% of the work is done online 
>> by people who don't need any "face-to-face" meetings to get 
>> "things done." :)
>> 
>> Also, my suggestions are about enabling more face-to-face 
>> time, not less, so there's that too.
>> 
>>> Additionally, the conference serves other "soft" purposes. 
>>> Specifically, marketing and education. The conference 
>>> provides legitimacy to DLang and the Foundation both by it's 
>>> mere existence and as a venue for companies using DLang to 
>>> share their support (via sponsorships) or announce their 
>>> products (as seen by the Weka.io announcement at DConf 2018) 
>>> which further enhances the marketing of both the product 
>>> being launched and DLang itself.
>> 
>> Don't make me laugh: what part of this 
>> marketing/legitimization couldn't be done at either of the two 
>> alternatives I gave?
>>  >> I have spoken to Walter about DConf numerous times. He has 
>> nothing
>>> against, and indeed actively encourages, local meetups. But 
>>> they do not serve the purpose that DConf does. My 
>>> understanding from my conversations with Walter is that the 
>>> primary purpose of DConf is to provide a venue that is open 
>>> to anyone interested to come together and discuss all things 
>>> D. He specifically does not want something that is only 
>>> limited to the "core" members. As this suggestion runs 
>>> precisely counter to the primary stated purpose of DConf it 
>>> is unlikely to gain significant traction from the D-BDFL.
>> 
>> Wrong, both of my suggestions fulfil that purpose _better_. 
>> What they don't do is limit attendance to those who have the 
>> passion _and_ can afford the time and money to travel 2-20 
>> hours away to a single location, just so they can get all the 
>> in-person benefits you claim.
>> 
>
> You misunderstand my point. What you are asking for is the 
> balkanization of the community by splitting it up along 
> regional geographic boundaries. What you are demanding would 
> mean that we only ever meet the people from our specific 
> geographic regions. Not one of the people I listed is in my 
> geographic region. Therefore I would NEVER meet them, and 
> indeed, I never would have if not for DConf. This demand is 
> tribalism at it's worst.

First off, I never "demanded" anything. I have presented reasons 
why the current format should be changed and said it makes a lot 
of sense to change, so much so that not doing so would signal 
negligence.

If you want to meet someone from a DConf location that's farther 
away, nobody's forcing you to go to the local DConf: you can 
always fly across the country to see Andrei and Steven in Boston. 
Yes, you won't get to see all of the core team if they're not all 
there, but I don't see why you're so obsessed with that. You 
contribute almost nothing to the dlang organization on github, 
what do you want to fly across the world to see them for anyway?

https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=user%3Adlang+author%3Alightbender&type=Issues

I see six merged pulls, none in the last four years, most of them 
trivial C declarations.

Your balkanization/tribalism claims are really ridiculous, 
suggesting you don't even know what those words mean. Tribalism 
refers to trying to keep everybody in your tribe together, 
usually by attacking a common enemy, yet you simultaneously 
accuse me of balkanization, ie splitting up the community by 
decentralizing DConf. So which is it: am I trying to keep the 
tribe together or split it up? Don't answer that, I know whatever 
you say won't make any sense either.

The truth is that you're the one here suffering from tribalism, 
because you'd rather keep the traditional DConf-going tribe 
together than open the community up with many more DConf 
locations. That only causes "balkanization" if you're forced to 
go to the local DConf, but since you have the interest and can 
afford to fly to any far-away location anyway, clearly that's not 
a problem for you.

> The purpose of DConf is that it is specifically open to any 
> person from anywhere in the world who wishs to attend. It is a 
> global meeting point for everyone. What you keep propounding is 
> a Meetup. We have those. They have not yet been able to replace 
> DConf in terms of cost-benefit effectiveness as judged by the 
> attendance of DConf. Balkanizing the community will no more 
> produce forward motion than a single conference limited to just 
> the "core" people.

What is the use of having a single "global meeting point" that 
99.5+% of the community doesn't attend? Yes, a decentralized 
DConf has some similarities to meetups, but it's not the same. 
For one, these would be all-day events, not one-off talks like 
meetups.

I have no idea how you determine the "cost-benefit effectiveness" 
of meetups versus DConf, considering an order of magnitude or two 
more people attend the meetups than DConf. Andrei's talk in 
Munich last year alone had more people attending than DConf:

https://www.meetup.com/Munich-D-Programmers/events/243402617/

>>> Yes, it is expensive, but in all the years I've attended, I 
>>> have not once regretted spending the money. And indeed, 
>>> coming from the west coast of the US, I have one of the more 
>>> expensive (and physically taxing) trips to make. I know a 
>>> number of people who found jobs in D through DConf, would 
>>> that not make the conference worth it to them?
>> 
>> How many people got jobs versus how many attended? Would that 
>> money to get 100 people in the same room seven times have been 
>> much better spent on other things?  Run the cost-benefit 
>> analysis and I think it's obvious my two suggestions come out 
>> better. At best, you can maybe say that wasn't the case at the 
>> first DConf in 2007, when high-speed internet wasn't as 
>> pervasive and Youtube was only two years old, but not for 
>> every DConf since.
>> 
>
> To the one person who did, the collective cost is irrelevant. 
> To them it was literally a life-changing event. Is their 
> experience somehow less relevant, important, or meaningful?

You don't make organizational plans for the D community based on 
emotional pleas about a single "life-changing event," especially 
since no reason has been given why that event wouldn't happen 
anyway if the DConf format changed.

Rather, the goal should be to enable the growth of the D 
community as a whole, not finding a few people within the 
community jobs that supposedly "change their life."

>>> Something is only expensive if you derive less value from it 
>>> than it costs. And for many people here, I understand if the 
>>> cost-benefit analysis does not favor DConf. But calling for 
>>> an end to DConf simply because it doesn't meet someones 
>>> cost-benefit ratio is inconsiderate to the rest of us who do 
>>> find the benefit.
>> 
>> I don't care about your personal cost-benefit ratio. I care 
>> about the cost-benefit analysis to the language and ecosystem 
>> as a whole.
>> 
>
> What, pray tell, is so cost ineffective about the conference if 
> enough people choose to attend every year that it does not 
> loose money?

Just because DConf currently covers its costs has essentially no 
bearing on whether it is the best possible use of that money.

Apple could have just kept coming out with new iPods for years 
and been very profitable, rather than coming out with a different 
product like the iPhone in 2007. But the fact that they made that 
leap into the smartphone market is what makes them the largest 
and most profitable company in the world today, even though they 
knew and discussed the fact that it would cannibalize their 
existing iPod business.

Similarly, the D leadership's goal shouldn't be to maintain a 
profitable but antiquated DConf format, but to grow the community 
much more.

>>> Nobody is making you go, and, since you already get 
>>> everything you want from the YouTube video uploads during the 
>>> conference, why do you care if the rest of us "waste" our 
>>> money on attending the conference? That is our choice. Not 
>>> yours.
>> 
>> Try reading the older forum thread I originally linked, 
>> Jonathan and I have already been over all this. D is a 
>> collective effort, and it's a colossal waste of the 
>> community's efforts to spend all that time and money on the 
>> dying conference format that DConf has been using.
>> 
>> It signals to me and many others that D is not a serious 
>> effort to get used as a language, but simply a bunch of 
>> hobbyists who want to have "fun" meeting up at an exotic 
>> locale once a year, in between hacking on an experimental 
>> language that they're fine if nobody else uses.
>> 
>
> It may signal that to you, but I have seen no evidence that it 
> signals it to others.

Until recently, nobody strongly made this case for changing the 
format. But now that I have and the market shows that format 
declining, I think that will be the signal sent by keeping the 
status quo.

> And I'd hardly call Berlin or Munich "exotic". Now if we could 
> get something going in Mallorca, or Sardinia, or Bali... Beam 
> me up Scotty!

For most engineers not living in Germany or Palo Alto, those 
locales are exotic enough. That there are bigger party locations 
is neither here nor there.

>> If that's D's focus, fine, just own it. Put it on the front 
>> page: "This is a hobbyist language, please don't bother using 
>> it in production. We are much more focused on where we can 
>> vacation together next year than trying to spread awareness 
>> and improve the language."
>> 
>> Regardless of whether you post that notice or not, that is 
>> what continuing the current DConf format advertises, given 
>> that others have already been moving away from it.
>> 
>>> Note: Limiting anything to "core" members is a guaranteed way 
>>> to create a mono-culture and would inevitably lead to the 
>>> stagnation of D.
>> 
>> Good, then you agree with me that we should avoid such 
>> stagnation by broadening DConf to be a bunch of meetups in 
>> many more cities?
>> 
>>> Which is why anybody can post to all NG's, even the internals 
>>> NG.
>> 
>> This is not actually true. There are two newsgroups that seem 
>> to have that designation, which show up separately as 
>> `internals` and `dmd` at forum.dlang.org, and the latter 
>> doesn't allow me to post to it without registering somewhere, 
>> unlike the rest of the web forums.
>> 
>> Guess what the current DConf format does to most people who 
>> don't attend too...
>> 
>> I'm done responding to these irrational responses that ignore 
>> everything I wrote. I'll just link them to this long debunking 
>> from now on.
>
> In all of your response I get the sense that there is a deeply 
> personal motivation behind your crusade. Yet you dance around 
> that motivation carefully

That's funny, because that's precisely the sense I get from you, 
given your wildly incoherent responses so far that cannot even 
get the facts straight, like how many conferences were shown to 
be closing.

There is nothing "deeply personal," nor is it a "crusade." I 
don't know how I can dance around a motivation that until now 
nobody other than you has even mentioned.

> you routinely dismiss other peoples experiences as invalid 
> either simply because you disagree,

Please point to a single instance where I dismissed someone's 
"experiences," you will find none in this entire thread. Nobody 
has even talked about their experiences, and I'm not sure how you 
even "disagree" with an experience. One can disagree with the 
conclusions they draw from that experience, but not the 
experience itself.

> or some other conference did something different

I have literally not presented _any_ other conference as 
precedent. I think this may now pass more than a dozen times you 
simply make up stuff you think I said. That's a stunning record 
for just two posts.

> and you set up strawmen to attack

Please point to a single strawman I created. I have pointed out 
more than a dozen you made up.

> rather than directly answering questions.

Heh, I have obsessively answered all your questions, while you 
just ignore mine.

> Please. For the benefit of all of us. Explain your motivation.

It is very simple. Unlike you, I'm presenting ideas to advance 
the D language and community. I'm not making arguments from the 
point of "I'd like to have fun in Berlin for 3-4 days and then 
ignore D again for the next four years."

> The level of emotion you are bringing to this debate cannot be 
> rationally explained on the merits of your argument alone.

There is no emotion in the vast majority of what I wrote, merely 
dispassionate arguments. I have gotten somewhat frustrated with 
how you repeatedly make up stuff and attribute it to me or 
strangely talk about how we're "social animals" when I was 
pushing for more in-person interaction in the first place, but 
the only time I got angry was when you mirrored Jonathan's 
argument from the previous thread, basically saying, "We enjoy 
flying across the world for the current DConf format, why should 
we listen to anything you say?" I then pointed out that exhibited 
a very narrow mindset, ie that your personal enjoyment was more 
important than what actually advanced the D ecosystem.

Anyway, it's clear that you're incapable of contributing to a 
debate on the DConf format, considering all the factual errors 
you've made so far and that you finally stooped to the level of 
questioning my motivations, so I'll stop responding to you now.