On Friday, 28 December 2018 at 07:08:19 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
While I admire your persistence I fail to understand why you
simply don't ignore stuff you do not like. If you do not like
conferences fine - do not go there, and let us who do like them
and think they are useful have some fun!
Some of us want to improve things for everyone else, too.
Isn't that what open source is all about? We do it initially
because it works for us, but then share it because it helps the
community as well.
If you actually tried these improvements, you'd probably like
them. Even our conservative managers at the day job have
responded positively to similar changes we made over the last
year.
We're a predominately remote organization and used to have
org-wide in-person meetings that worked very much like dconf does
now - someone would be designated to rattle off about a
powerpoint while everyone else passively watches.
For last year's meeting, my manager (the team I'm on has done our
meetings differently for a while) convinced the CEO to try a more
interactive approach for the org-wide meeting too. We did that
speaker intro, small random group work, whole group conclusion
pattern.
It was a success. Everyone was more engaged, we had more
cross-team collaboration (which has continued throughout the year
as people are more comfortable with each other!), and people have
shown better retention of the material. Staff surveys about
subjective feelings about this meeting were up, too, people said
it is more enjoyable.
And this shouldn't be a surprise! We find in education that using
a variety of teaching strategies and getting students hands-on
and working together almost always leads to better outcomes.
Of course, most people STILL say their favorite part was the
after-hours chats... but I say that's because the in-hours stuff
was still basically work :P
But I'm telling you, DConf can learn from this stuff. Joakim is
doing the community a service by trying to get you all to try
some changes. Even baby step compromises can yield results at low
risk.
