Josh Triplett <[email protected]> writes: > On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 09:54:04AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote: >> On Mon, 10 Sep 2018, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>>> DebConf. I'd *never* describe DebConf Q&A as "an open mic pedantry >>> slam", from many years of experience. I'm used to people asking >> +1 >> 25 years of attending conferences I have never seen an "open mic >> pedantry slam". > The vast majority of conferences I go to, I've heard *at least* one > non-question question. > A good moderator can help address that (you can get halfway there by > just reminding people "ask questions, don't make statements or comments; > make sure your question benefits the whole room". I don't think non-question questions are inherently the problem. Some of those are pretty good. It's more the "not a question, more of a comment" sort of a question where the "questioner" starts to give a little talk of their own on some topic vaguely related to the talk. Those can be pretty bad; often they're a waste of everyone else's time, and at worst they can be really condescending and hostile. That said, I don't personally recall hearing one of those at DebConf. I've probably missed some, but DebConf also has some really high-quality post-talk discussion. It also allows people like me who loathe preparing for talks run super-informal "talks" that mostly involve free-form riffing on whatever the audience wants to talk about in some problem area and turning it into a general discussion, which is kind of amazing (although certainly not always appropriate) and some of my favorite moments at DebConf. If any of our presenters would like no Q&A as an option, I'm all in favor, of course. I totally understand the problem of not understanding English well, since I have really struggled with questions after a talk because my hearing isn't great and I struggle with non-US accents (including UK and Australian accents; it's not about not being a native speaker). But I do wonder if this is addressing a problem that we don't have to the same degree in DebConf because we have such a collaborative project and talks feel more like a semi-formal start to a conversation, sort of like a long and well-thought-out message to debian-devel. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
