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

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

Hi Bernelle,

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 02:35:00PM +0200, Bernelle Verster wrote:
> Online has significant advantages. The biggest challenge is the social bit.

I think the "social bit" is not to be underestimated. To me, the biggest
thing about debconf is not the talks, but the meeting of kindred spirits
in a social setting.

Just before my first debconf in 2005, I was getting demotivated working
on Debian; I had the feeling that what I was doing wasn't that
important, and that I should maybe just give up, and let other people
take care of things. Meeting so many like-minded people at debconf5, and
seeing the respect people were having for my m68k work at the time,
reinvigorated my passion for the project and meant I was more than happy
to continue doing things for Debian. I would be surprised if my
experience here was unique.

As another anecdotic piece of evidence, at debconf16's debcamp I was
working on fixing #796633. I got stuck at some point while doing this,
but then Tollef Fog Heen (who knew systemd better than me at the time)
sat down with me and helped me think things through, and we managed to
come up with a working solution in the end. I'm sure I would have been
able to figure out the issues by myself had I not been at debcamp. I'm
also sure it would have been in a time frame of months, rather than
days.

I understand (and support) the desire to have less global flights,
because global warming is a real thing and it is something we need to
work on if we're going to sustain life on our planet for the long term.
At the same time, for *Debian*, the effect of having a global,
in-person, meeting of minds has side effects for the project the reach
of which are not to be underestimated, and that we can't (yet?) replace
by a virtual meeting.

So while I'm all for improving our online debconf experience, and
believe we should use the new technologies we developed for the online
debconf to make our in-person debconfs more inclusive for people who
can't make it, I am absolutely also of the firm opinion that we should
continue to hold in-person debconfs, until the day comes where we can
create the same hallway track experience online that we have on
in-person debconfs.

Because to me, the hallway track of a debconf is way, way, *way* more
important than the talks. After all, I can watch talk recordings at
home, but I can't do hallway track meetings at home.

Thanks,

-- 
     w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}