On 12/22/2018 10:20 PM, Joakim wrote:
Honestly, yours are routinely the worst presentations at DConf. Your strength as
a presenter is when you dig deeply into a bunch of technical detail or present
some new technical paradigm, similar to Andrei. Yet, your DConf keynotes usually
go the exact opposite route and go very lightly over not very much at all.
Eh, I went pretty far into the DIP 1000 material.
1) Ditch in-person presentations for pre-recorded talks that people watch on
their own time. Getting everybody in the same room in London to silently watch
talks together is a horrible waste, that only made sense before we all had
high-speed internet-connected TVs and smartphones with good cameras. Do a
four-day hackathon instead, ie mostly collaboration, not passive viewing.
It's very different listening to a presentation live rather than pre-recorded.
There are the before and after interactions they inspire.
2) Rather than doing a central DConf that most cannot justify attending, do
several locations, eg in the cities the core team already lives in, like Boston,
Seattle, San Jose, Hong Kong, etc. This makes it cost-effective for many more
people to attend, and since you'll have ditched the in-person tech talks, spend
the time introducing the many more attendees to the language or have those who
already know it work on the language/libraries, ie something like the current
DConf hackathon.
London is the most cost-effective destination for most D team members. For
distributed meetings, there have been several D meetups that do what you
suggest. While fun and valuable, they're not a replacement for DConf.
3) Get the core team together as a separate event, either as an offline retreat
or online video conference or both. I know you guys need to meet once in awhile,
but it makes no sense to spend most of that in-person time at DConf staring at
talks that could be viewed online later.
If you ever came to one, you might see it differently.
While I find it questionable to say that they couldn't easily find and recruit
those people online, given that D is primarly an online project where most
everything and everyone is easily available online, I see no reason why any of
the changes above would stop that.
There's a very clear connection between DConf and successful collaborations with
industry and D developers. Why mess with success?
It seems clear to me that you, at the very least, have not engaged with the
links and ideas I've been providing about why the current DConf format is broken.
Your opinions would have more weight if (1) you've ever attended a DConf and (2)
can point to successful instantiations of your theories.
My fundamental point is that the current DConf conference format is an outdated
relic, that made sense decades ago when getting everybody together in a room in
Berlin was a fantastic way to get everybody connected. With the ready
availability of high-speed internet and video displays to everybody who can
afford to pay the registration fee and go to London, that hoary conference
format needs to be rethought for the internet age.
I have no problem with anybody disagreeing with my suggestions or the reasoning
behind them, but I find it flabbergasting for anyone to suggest, as Mike has
above, that the old conference format still makes sense, especially given the
documented evidence of it declining.
People *like* conferences. You can buy a Led Zeppelin CD or spend $$$$ to see
them live and enjoy it with the crowd. Maybe you'll go backstage and meet &
greet. Which would you rather do?
BTW, another point for the presentations is that we cover the air fare and hotel
expenses for the presenters. Quite a lot of people have been able to attend
because of this. It's our way of giving a little bit back to strong contributors.
