On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 12:13:09 UTC, 鲜卑拓跋枫 wrote:
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 10:50:52 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I coincidentally just read this blog post, that summarizes a
lot of my thoughts against conferences and meetups:
https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era
Maybe a good first step would be a mostly online DConf geared
towards Asian timezones? I could help out with arranging those
online talks.
It seems that people in different countries of Asia may live in
different timezone.
So do people in US and Europe, the vast majority of whom watching
the livestream or online videos didn't attend DConf.
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 12:30:49 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 11:54:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I don't, I think it would be a huge improvement. There are
very few benefits to getting people together in person in our
hyperconnected age, and while "key developers in the same
place" may be one of those, that excludes almost everybody
else at DConf.
Except it doesn't exclude anyone -- it's not just the key
developers.
First off, I question there's much benefit to even the key devs
beyond communicating through email and video conferencing to iron
things out, as Andrei indicates he does with Walter.
And Jonathan only mentioned the key devs, so that does exclude.
As for everybody else, see below.
Honestly, getting everybody together in a room and having them
stare straight ahead at a speaker is a blindingly stupid waste
of time these days. The only advantage of everybody being
together in a room is the heightened communication bandwidth,
and then you all sit next to each other staring straight ahead
silently. The conference format made sense when pretty much
everybody attending didn't have high-speed internet and
connected video displays decades ago, but they make no sense
now, as that blog post notes.
There are huge benefits to being there in person that extend
beyond the time spent listening to the talks. People congregate
in the lobby after hours, have three meals a day together,
exchange ideas, make new contacts that lead to collaborations
down the line... I wouldn't trade the time I've spent at the
four DConfs I've attended for anything and very much regret
missing the two I couldn't attend.
Then spend all your time doing those things: why waste the
majority of conference time sitting through talks that you don't
bother defending?
Here's what a "conference" in Asia or Europe or wherever should
probably look like in this day and age:
- Have most talks prerecorded by the speaker on their webcam or
smartphone, which produce excellent video these days with not
much fiddling, and have a couple organizers work with them to get
those home-brewed videos up to a certain quality level, both in
content and presentation, before posting them online.
- Once the videos are all up, set up weekend meetups in several
cities in the region, such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangalore,
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.
This is just off the top of my head; I'm sure I'm missing some
small details here and there, as I was coming up with parts of
this as I wrote it, but I estimate it'd be an order of magnitude
more productive than the current conference format while being
vastly cheaper in total cost to all involved. Since D is not
exactly drowning in money, it makes no sense to waste it on the
antiquated conference format. Some American D devs may complain
that they no longer essentially get to go on a vacation to Berlin
or Munich- a paid vacation if their company compensates for such
tech conferences- but that's not our problem.
