On 2020-05-23 05:46 +0800, Andrew Lee wrote: > As crisis is turning point. According to everyone's feedback. I also believe to > have the conference in person is not the best option to fight together to the > virus. And I also don't want our DebConf orga team's efforts to be wasted. > > I believe orga team has done their best. We hope we all may work together to > make this year as the first special DebConf ever with revolutionary arrangement > (online, VR/XR...etc) possible. Large in-person conferences are not just a problem because of the disease risk, but also because they are very high-carbon activities that are increasingly difficult to justify. Lots of organisations have discovered that they can do their meet-ups remotely recently, and I think we should take this opportunity to see if we can too. We should be better at this than most. Experience in other organisations is that all-remote events (i.e. where everyone is remote on the same footing) work a lot better than mixed events where some people are remote and some are there in-person. Obviously events where everyone are in-person work even better, but that's clearly not going to happen this year however things go, and has never been true anyway. So I vote for working on a fully-remote conference this year, if only by way of a trial-run. If it works reasonably well then maybe in future we could have a full in-person conference every 3 or 4 years or so, with remote ones being the annual norm (it would be a hell of a lot easier to organise if nothing else). I realise that's pretty radical, but events like debconf are a significant part of the excessive emissions of many of us, and 2020 is clearly a year for a rethink of many things. Lets not waste the opportunity to rethink debconf. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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