Re: Questions after talks at DebConf (idea)
Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> 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 (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: