On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I'm sure some thought and planning is now going into the next
DConf, so I'd like to make sure people are aware that the
conference format that DConf uses is dying off, as explained
here:
https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era
There was a discussion about this in a previous forum thread:
https://forum.dlang.org/post/bnbldtdfeppzjuthx...@forum.dlang.org
Jonathan and Mike argue in that thread that DConf is great for
the core team to get together in person and hash things out for
D with very high-bandwidth interaction, but I pointed out that
doesn't justify 95%+ of the attendees being there. If there's a
real need for this, maybe get those 8-15 people together in an
online video conference or offline retreat, without a bunch of
hangers-on and talks.
People are now experimenting with what replaces conferences, we
should be doing that too. I came up with some ideas in that
thread:
"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."
I volunteer to help presenters do this.
"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.
At the very least, DConf should just be a big hackathon of
self-organizing groups, rather than wasting any time passively
imbibing talks next to a hundred other people. I still don't
think the cost of getting a hundred people in the same room for
3-4 days would be justified, but at least it would be a step in
the right direction.
I highly disagree with this.
I love conferences and meetups.
It's good socially and a conference is not 100% just about the
topic it hosts.
Ex. for D conf there is much more than just D. There is also the
minor escape from reality to new surroundings, like a mini
vacation etc.
Please do not get rid of D Conf, because next year I can finally
attend.
