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.
