Re: The future of DebConf, online lessons from the pandemic [Was: Re: DebConf21 online, DebConf22 in Kosovo, DebConf23 in India, DebConf24 in Israel]

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Bernelle Verster 

>  For me it's less about duplicating the obvious things we expect -
> more interaction with faces through video, for example, and more about
> finding out the needs we were trying to express/address with the
> different things we did. We may end up at the same solutions, but
> getting there by asking different questions may change the quality of
> the execution and experience greatly. Unfortunately most of these are
> not obvious at all! Has sociologists done research on this??

To me, the hard-to-replicate parts of a debconf are about creating
shared experiences rather than the talks themselves.  It's meeting new
and old friends, sharing a meal and discussing life, the universe and
everything.  It's learning a little bit about the local area and the
culture, typically mostly during the daytrip and the evenings.  It's not
the pure information transfer during talks.

For me, it is also just setting aside the time (as you mention).  When
at debconf, the rest of the world is confined to the small screen, and
its ability to require my attention is smaller. When at home, it's the
opposite, and it's easy for something to come up that one needs to do.
I don't really think this is fixable.

I think that online events can work, but they're something else, and
what you get from them is very different than an in-person event.
Lifting an event like the cheese and wine party from the in-person world
to «go out and buy a few cheeses and some crackers and wine» just
doesn't compare, so any events that are trying to replicate similar
results need to do something very different, not just the same, but
online.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are