The short and long-term future of community conferences
([Front] Mar 10, 2020 0:53 UTC (Tue) (corbet))
- Reference: 0000814420
- News link: https://lwn.net/Articles/814420
- Source link:
By Jonathan Corbet
March 10, 2020 The Linux development community is spread out over the planet and interacts primarily through email and online systems. It is widely felt, though, that there is great value in getting people together in person occasionally to talk about current issues and get to know each other as people. This year, though, the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting the conference schedule to an extent that won't be known for some time. But there are longer-term concerns as well, to the point that the head organizer for one of the kernel community's most successful events is questioning whether it should continue to exist.
Short-term disruption
While some conferences scheduled in March have proceeded as planned — [1]SCaLE 18x being one example — many others have been canceled or postponed to a later date. There are two obvious reasons for this: gathering large numbers of people together into close quarters while a pandemic is growing is ill-advised in general, and many of the participants and speakers have decided not to participate in any case. This is creating some short-term economic pain for conference organizers, and it hurts the communities that have been deprived of their gatherings. But, by most accounts, canceling these events is the only right thing to do.
It will be interesting to see what will happen in the near future. Many of the canceled events are attempting to reschedule during the (northern hemisphere) summer months when, it is hoped, there will be a respite from the pandemic, company travel bans will be rescinded, and the mood will be generally better. It is worth noting that the authorities have been clear that this respite may or may not happen; if things do not get better, a lot of organizers and attendees are going to be disappointed a second time. In that case, regular events may not return for some time.
If the situation does improve in the coming months, then conference-goers can expect a rather busy summer as all of the postponed events land on top of the other conferences that were already scheduled during that time. That, too, may affect the success of some events; there are only so many conferences one can go to over a short period of time. Trust us, here at LWN we've explored those limits fully.
Community events in the longer term
Even before the current difficulties, community conferences have been experiencing a number of challenges. High on that list is the fact that many events are having a harder time finding sponsors; since corporate sponsors cover a large portion of the expense of running a typical event, that is an existential problem. Corporate mergers have reduced the number of sponsor prospects to begin with; a conference that once got support from both IBM and Red Hat will likely find one of those streams drying up. Companies seem to be tightening their grip on this sort of expenditure in general. Additionally, conference sponsorship money is often controlled by a company's marketing department; since a development conference tends to generate little in the way of sales leads, enthusiasm for sponsoring it will be limited.
The sheer number of conferences being run is a challenge for both sponsorship budgets and attendees. A quick look at the [2]LWN events calendar shows that there is almost always a relevant event happening somewhere. That makes for a nice range of choices for attendees — until one starts to feel the need to attend several of them. And even companies with generous sponsorship budgets can only support so many events.
There is also the fundamental question of what our events are for. In that context, it is worthwhile to take a look at [3]this message from Josef Bacik, the lead organizer for the 2020 [4]Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit . LSFMM is one of the community's most focused and technical events; it's a place where a lot of work gets done. So when its lead organizer says that it has outlived its usefulness and should be killed off, people tend to take notice.
Bacik's note describes some of the tensions that have affected a number of community events over the years. One of those has to do with size and inclusivity. Developers tend to prefer smaller events with a high concentration of people they know, and who are working on similar problems. In such a setting, it is easy to have conversations with the relevant people to get specific problems solved; this kind of event can be highly productive. As a conference gets larger, though, the number of people who are not directly involved with the topics of interest grows, and it gets harder to have focused discussions or stumble across the right people in the hallway.
Conferences like LSFMM use an invitation process in order to create the desired environment; only people who are active in the relevant areas get in, and not too many of those even. The problem with an invitation process is that, even in a world where it is run entirely fairly, it is exclusive. Established developers can get in; new developers are going to have a much harder time.
This kind of system tends to create a group of "in" participants that can be difficult for others to break into. You need to be known to the top-tier developers to get an invitation, but if you're unable to meet them at an event, it's that much harder to become known. The community absolutely needs new developers; there is no shortage of work to be done, even if the existing developers continue working indefinitely. Putting up barriers hurts the community in the long run.
One can argue for letting more people in, but that runs up against Bacik's next concern: that the conference is already getting too big. Making it even larger threatens to dilute the working nature of the conference, which Bacik fears is already reduced from what it once was. The need for sponsorships, which companies often buy because they want the attendee slots that are usually part of the deal, makes things worse. A sponsorship is an attractive product because it allows a company to bypass the invitation process and get access to the development community, but each sponsorship sold makes the conference that much bigger.
Bacik also complains about presentations — a complaint that is heard frequently around working conferences. A good conference involves a lot of discussion and problem solving; sitting passively and listening to somebody describe their work is not what attendees are looking for. Presentations, too, fill an important role; even avid LWN readers cannot be current on what is happening in all corners of the community, so that information needs to be communicated somehow. But there doesn't always seem to be a consensus on where that should happen.
Bacik suggested that, if LSFMM were to be abolished, developers could go to the [5]Linux Plumbers Conference instead. There is no invitation system there, and that event is good at getting a lot of work done as well. But LPC has a similar problem that reveals itself in a different way: the event tends to sell out quickly. In 2019, the only way in was to register during the few hours when seats were available, or to get your company to sponsor the event. That is not an entirely inclusive system either; trying to absorb an event like LSFMM would not improve the situation.
What should our conferences be?
It is clear that we have some conflicting expectations regarding our community events. We want small, focused events where established developers can solve problems without a lot of distractions around, but we also want to be open to new developers. We want to communicate our work to others and learn what others are up to, but we have limited patience for sitting through presentations. We want to let new developers — or would-be developers — meet established developers and learn about our community, but we don't want our events to get big and, to a real extent, we don't want to go the effort of meeting and teaching those people.
The community has a number of high-quality working conferences now. The pressures of fundraising and conference burnout may well reduce the number of such events in the future, though. There is no shortage of more commercially oriented events for those who want to go to them; the development community has generally chosen to sit those out in recent years. What we seem to be missing are events where the development community opens itself up to outsiders. The Linux Plumbers Conference fills that role to an extent, but only for those who can get seats. FOSDEM arguably works that way, but it is also a demonstration of what happens when there is no control over the size of the event at all.
We don't really have a model for the sort of event that achieves our many conflicting goals.
How all of this will play out remains to be seen. Perhaps, after a period when all conferences have been canceled, we will all decide that we're better off without all those airline and hotel ballroom experiences anyway, and they'll never come back. But the truth is that there is value in getting the development community together; it makes everything run far more smoothly when we're all back behind our keyboards. So we will need to figure out ways to have events that meet all of our needs; happily, figuring things out is something we are good at.
[1] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/18x
[2] https://lwn.net/Calendar/
[3] https://lwn.net/ml/linux-fsdevel/b506a373-c127-b92e-9824-16e8267fc910@toxicpanda.com/
[4] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lsfmm/
[5] https://linuxplumbersconf.org/
March 10, 2020 The Linux development community is spread out over the planet and interacts primarily through email and online systems. It is widely felt, though, that there is great value in getting people together in person occasionally to talk about current issues and get to know each other as people. This year, though, the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting the conference schedule to an extent that won't be known for some time. But there are longer-term concerns as well, to the point that the head organizer for one of the kernel community's most successful events is questioning whether it should continue to exist.
Short-term disruption
While some conferences scheduled in March have proceeded as planned — [1]SCaLE 18x being one example — many others have been canceled or postponed to a later date. There are two obvious reasons for this: gathering large numbers of people together into close quarters while a pandemic is growing is ill-advised in general, and many of the participants and speakers have decided not to participate in any case. This is creating some short-term economic pain for conference organizers, and it hurts the communities that have been deprived of their gatherings. But, by most accounts, canceling these events is the only right thing to do.
It will be interesting to see what will happen in the near future. Many of the canceled events are attempting to reschedule during the (northern hemisphere) summer months when, it is hoped, there will be a respite from the pandemic, company travel bans will be rescinded, and the mood will be generally better. It is worth noting that the authorities have been clear that this respite may or may not happen; if things do not get better, a lot of organizers and attendees are going to be disappointed a second time. In that case, regular events may not return for some time.
If the situation does improve in the coming months, then conference-goers can expect a rather busy summer as all of the postponed events land on top of the other conferences that were already scheduled during that time. That, too, may affect the success of some events; there are only so many conferences one can go to over a short period of time. Trust us, here at LWN we've explored those limits fully.
Community events in the longer term
Even before the current difficulties, community conferences have been experiencing a number of challenges. High on that list is the fact that many events are having a harder time finding sponsors; since corporate sponsors cover a large portion of the expense of running a typical event, that is an existential problem. Corporate mergers have reduced the number of sponsor prospects to begin with; a conference that once got support from both IBM and Red Hat will likely find one of those streams drying up. Companies seem to be tightening their grip on this sort of expenditure in general. Additionally, conference sponsorship money is often controlled by a company's marketing department; since a development conference tends to generate little in the way of sales leads, enthusiasm for sponsoring it will be limited.
The sheer number of conferences being run is a challenge for both sponsorship budgets and attendees. A quick look at the [2]LWN events calendar shows that there is almost always a relevant event happening somewhere. That makes for a nice range of choices for attendees — until one starts to feel the need to attend several of them. And even companies with generous sponsorship budgets can only support so many events.
There is also the fundamental question of what our events are for. In that context, it is worthwhile to take a look at [3]this message from Josef Bacik, the lead organizer for the 2020 [4]Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit . LSFMM is one of the community's most focused and technical events; it's a place where a lot of work gets done. So when its lead organizer says that it has outlived its usefulness and should be killed off, people tend to take notice.
Bacik's note describes some of the tensions that have affected a number of community events over the years. One of those has to do with size and inclusivity. Developers tend to prefer smaller events with a high concentration of people they know, and who are working on similar problems. In such a setting, it is easy to have conversations with the relevant people to get specific problems solved; this kind of event can be highly productive. As a conference gets larger, though, the number of people who are not directly involved with the topics of interest grows, and it gets harder to have focused discussions or stumble across the right people in the hallway.
Conferences like LSFMM use an invitation process in order to create the desired environment; only people who are active in the relevant areas get in, and not too many of those even. The problem with an invitation process is that, even in a world where it is run entirely fairly, it is exclusive. Established developers can get in; new developers are going to have a much harder time.
This kind of system tends to create a group of "in" participants that can be difficult for others to break into. You need to be known to the top-tier developers to get an invitation, but if you're unable to meet them at an event, it's that much harder to become known. The community absolutely needs new developers; there is no shortage of work to be done, even if the existing developers continue working indefinitely. Putting up barriers hurts the community in the long run.
One can argue for letting more people in, but that runs up against Bacik's next concern: that the conference is already getting too big. Making it even larger threatens to dilute the working nature of the conference, which Bacik fears is already reduced from what it once was. The need for sponsorships, which companies often buy because they want the attendee slots that are usually part of the deal, makes things worse. A sponsorship is an attractive product because it allows a company to bypass the invitation process and get access to the development community, but each sponsorship sold makes the conference that much bigger.
Bacik also complains about presentations — a complaint that is heard frequently around working conferences. A good conference involves a lot of discussion and problem solving; sitting passively and listening to somebody describe their work is not what attendees are looking for. Presentations, too, fill an important role; even avid LWN readers cannot be current on what is happening in all corners of the community, so that information needs to be communicated somehow. But there doesn't always seem to be a consensus on where that should happen.
Bacik suggested that, if LSFMM were to be abolished, developers could go to the [5]Linux Plumbers Conference instead. There is no invitation system there, and that event is good at getting a lot of work done as well. But LPC has a similar problem that reveals itself in a different way: the event tends to sell out quickly. In 2019, the only way in was to register during the few hours when seats were available, or to get your company to sponsor the event. That is not an entirely inclusive system either; trying to absorb an event like LSFMM would not improve the situation.
What should our conferences be?
It is clear that we have some conflicting expectations regarding our community events. We want small, focused events where established developers can solve problems without a lot of distractions around, but we also want to be open to new developers. We want to communicate our work to others and learn what others are up to, but we have limited patience for sitting through presentations. We want to let new developers — or would-be developers — meet established developers and learn about our community, but we don't want our events to get big and, to a real extent, we don't want to go the effort of meeting and teaching those people.
The community has a number of high-quality working conferences now. The pressures of fundraising and conference burnout may well reduce the number of such events in the future, though. There is no shortage of more commercially oriented events for those who want to go to them; the development community has generally chosen to sit those out in recent years. What we seem to be missing are events where the development community opens itself up to outsiders. The Linux Plumbers Conference fills that role to an extent, but only for those who can get seats. FOSDEM arguably works that way, but it is also a demonstration of what happens when there is no control over the size of the event at all.
We don't really have a model for the sort of event that achieves our many conflicting goals.
How all of this will play out remains to be seen. Perhaps, after a period when all conferences have been canceled, we will all decide that we're better off without all those airline and hotel ballroom experiences anyway, and they'll never come back. But the truth is that there is value in getting the development community together; it makes everything run far more smoothly when we're all back behind our keyboards. So we will need to figure out ways to have events that meet all of our needs; happily, figuring things out is something we are good at.
[1] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/18x
[2] https://lwn.net/Calendar/
[3] https://lwn.net/ml/linux-fsdevel/b506a373-c127-b92e-9824-16e8267fc910@toxicpanda.com/
[4] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lsfmm/
[5] https://linuxplumbersconf.org/
The short and long-term future of community conferences
It seems to me that the complexity of this problem comes from there being a whole range of needs that people are trying to meet at these conferences, and they're conflicting. Perhaps the upper levels of the kernel dev community could start by trying low-cost solutions that attempt to address some of their more cliquey needs, like scheduling ad-hoc conference calls when development problems need to be discussed verbally, and then see what needs are left to satisfy once that's become normal. Missing the "scribble ideas on the back of a napkin" experience? The cost of a wacom tablet and remote scribble-pad software is much cheaper than air fares, hotel bills, etc. That kind of solution is well worth trying. Then if there are still needs left that the old-school conference format will solve, the conferences will have a more focused purpose.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
It seems to me that the complexity of this problem comes from there being a whole range of needs that people are trying to meet at these conferences, and they're conflicting. Perhaps the upper levels of the kernel dev community could start by trying low-cost solutions that attempt to address some of their more cliquey needs, like scheduling ad-hoc conference calls when development problems need to be discussed verbally, and then see what needs are left to satisfy once that's become normal. Missing the "scribble ideas on the back of a napkin" experience? The cost of a wacom tablet and remote scribble-pad software is much cheaper than air fares, hotel bills, etc. That kind of solution is well worth trying. Then if there are still needs left that the old-school conference format will solve, the conferences will have a more focused purpose.
Not only in our communities...
During the last couple of years, I have felt more and more people in the Debian community preferring to attend local conferences over long-range ones (in our case, DebConf), because of issues such as the carbon footprint of global travel.
Back in January, the editorial for Communications of the ACM tackled this precise point, with an article aptly named "Publish and Perish" — For the academic community, which shares quite a bit with us.
[1]https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/1/241717-publish-and-...
Of course, this perfectly chimes in with the wave of conference cancellations (or people cancelling their participation) due to COVID-19. Lets see how this all unfolds...
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/1/241717-publish-and-perish/fulltext
Not only in our communities...
During the last couple of years, I have felt more and more people in the Debian community preferring to attend local conferences over long-range ones (in our case, DebConf), because of issues such as the carbon footprint of global travel.
Back in January, the editorial for Communications of the ACM tackled this precise point, with an article aptly named "Publish and Perish" — For the academic community, which shares quite a bit with us.
[1]https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/1/241717-publish-and-...
Of course, this perfectly chimes in with the wave of conference cancellations (or people cancelling their participation) due to COVID-19. Lets see how this all unfolds...
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/1/241717-publish-and-perish/fulltext
The short and long-term future of community conferences
Call me old school, but I have found that face to face conversations have always been way more productive than any online interactions. I've worked remotely from home since 2003, and typically go to a conference at least 5 times a year to meet up with others that work on similar areas that I do. My productivity would drop tremendously if I were to remove those meetings.
I practically live on IRC, use email constantly, and recently even been doing zoom calls several times a week. None of that comes close in comparison to a live face to face meeting. I don't know exactly what the reason is for that. Perhaps one can be more focused without distractions. Perhaps it's the fact that the environment is the same for everyone around, and we are not just talking into computer screens. I don't know. But I usually find that after a conference, I have a ton of ideas to improve my work that I don't have without them.
One big plus I do know of about conferences, is that I meet a lot of people that I normally would not have. That diversity may be the reason for the productivity I achieve from going to conferences.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
I wonder if e.g. video conferencing or something similar could be more useful for the "get work done" aspects of it. Or maybe allow the creation of smaller private "subgroups" of sorts in the overall bigger conference, and give short time slots for external, interested parties to interact with the private group via some sort of showcase / presentation with a discussion period or similar...
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
Just out of curiosity: Does anyone know a good Free/Libre Open Source Software to run a community conferences online? Maybe even a software that is able to mimic the social/hallway aspects of conferences properly in some way, to make sure your get to meet with relevant people, people with similar interests, and sometimes random people that offer a different perspective to things? Like you sometimes do at a conference before or after a talk, during coffee, or at lunch/dinner?
With climate change it IMHO would good if we had something like that, as it seems more and more people try to avoid flying long distances…
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
Jitsi Meet might be a good place to start.
Rooms can be made on the fly by simply going to an address e.g. [1]https://meet.jit.si/lwn-conference-article-discussion
[1] https://meet.jit.si/lwn-conference-article-discussion
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
Jitsi Meet might be a good place to start.
Rooms can be made on the fly by simply going to an address e.g. [1]https://meet.jit.si/lwn-conference-article-discussion
[1] https://meet.jit.si/lwn-conference-article-discussion
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
There are a few options, but it can be difficult to figure out and compare levels of freedoms and feature set.
One example of a feature to beware of is scalability: It is relatively easy with WebRTC to setup a streaming service for small groups, but scaling to more than 6-10 people requires more complex and/or expensive setup since simply sending all streams to everyone will fill the bandwidth.
Here are my rough notes on what features to look out for, and which tools and services are related to each other:
[1]https://source.redpill.dk/media-stream-hosting.git/tree/R...
Personally I would look for tools/services based on Janus rather than Jitsi, but it really depends on what kind of setup you are looking for.
[1] https://source.redpill.dk/media-stream-hosting.git/tree/README.md
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
I'm one of the contributors to [1]https://projectathena.io/
It's an Open Source fork of High Fidelity, a sort of spiritual successor to Second Life that failed earlier this year. Amazingly, it was fully open, so we picked it up and continuing development.
It's a 3D environment with very good support for VR, including full body tracking, but it also works in normal desktop mode. It has a high quality voice chat system, and allows for streaming video, screen sharing and embedding web content. Seems very suitable for a virtual conference.
The architecture is extremely distributed: you can easily host your own server on any VPS, and highly scalable (in the sense that a single environment can be spread among multiple machines if you need to support huge crowds). There's no central grid. Assets are simply hosted on HTTP.
It still needs a fair amount of polish, but overall it's extremely functional, and real work has been done with the current codebase. We do all our meetings in there. It works on Windows, Linux, OSX, Android and Oculus Quest, although currently we lack developers for OSX, Android and Quest (which is extremely experimental)
I gave a quick improvised talk on it at FOSDEM: [2]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/656044316128575488...
If anybody is interested, please join our Discord: [3]https://discord.gg/EX4HB5h
Feel free to ask any questions.
[1] https://projectathena.io/
[2] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/656044316128575488/673152550693765132/Fosdem_PA.webm
[3] https://discord.gg/EX4HB5h
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
This seems like an excellent way to have an international conference, epidemic or not.
I wonder whether large enough companies and universities would save a lot of money and carbon by building a large VR venue on-campus if this became common. Instead of sending employees to conferences, they would just spend those few days in the VR room, networking and listening to talks. The presenter of the talk would be standing three meters in front of you, talking to you instead of into a too-loud or soft microphone. Or why standing, even---the presenter of the 'talk' could be sitting next to you (and next to everyone else in their virtual world), scribbling notes on paper, showing you a code demo on a laptop, or any of the many other teaching styles that are not possible in a large auditorium. This would be possible if the conference was entirely virtual. As a stepping stone to that, you could host a conference in a physical location, but have a few hundred motorized telepresence robots that people can use to dial in via VR. So they get the same networking experience but can join remotely, together with the people that attend physically. It would be a pretty big deal if this eventually became the norm.
It does seem a bit sad that people would loose the after-conference drinks, social events/outings, etc. (although a multiplayer VR game held during the conference could serve as a (maybe not entirely adequate) replacement for that, as well as potentially also being more accessible and inclusive). On the other hand, it does seem good that people are preferring to attend local events. It makes sense that back when e.g. Debian was 100 people from all over the world, they would all need to travel to meet physically. But our communities have grown so that it's now often possible to find 100 fellows in your own city.
Anyway, not that any of this will happen, but one can wonder :) I am keenly looking forward to seeing how global and local travel will change even after the COVID-19 threat has receded, if people choose to continue forgoing their commutes for personal and environmental reasons.
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
This seems like an excellent way to have an international conference, epidemic or not.
I wonder whether large enough companies and universities would save a lot of money and carbon by building a large VR venue on-campus if this became common. Instead of sending employees to conferences, they would just spend those few days in the VR room, networking and listening to talks. The presenter of the talk would be standing three meters in front of you, talking to you instead of into a too-loud or soft microphone. Or why standing, even---the presenter of the 'talk' could be sitting next to you (and next to everyone else in their virtual world), scribbling notes on paper, showing you a code demo on a laptop, or any of the many other teaching styles that are not possible in a large auditorium. This would be possible if the conference was entirely virtual. As a stepping stone to that, you could host a conference in a physical location, but have a few hundred motorized telepresence robots that people can use to dial in via VR. So they get the same networking experience but can join remotely, together with the people that attend physically. It would be a pretty big deal if this eventually became the norm.
It does seem a bit sad that people would loose the after-conference drinks, social events/outings, etc. (although a multiplayer VR game held during the conference could serve as a (maybe not entirely adequate) replacement for that, as well as potentially also being more accessible and inclusive). On the other hand, it does seem good that people are preferring to attend local events. It makes sense that back when e.g. Debian was 100 people from all over the world, they would all need to travel to meet physically. But our communities have grown so that it's now often possible to find 100 fellows in your own city.
Anyway, not that any of this will happen, but one can wonder :) I am keenly looking forward to seeing how global and local travel will change even after the COVID-19 threat has receded, if people choose to continue forgoing their commutes for personal and environmental reasons.
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
People have been trying to do virtual meetings and conferences for a long time now. Second Life dabbled in it. High Fidelity started with a consumer oriented VR world, tried to pivot to business meetings, then died.
So far it hasn't succeeded, I suspect in good part because it's hard to improve on things like Zoom by adding 3D and VR on top. It adds extra difficulties, and in the vast majority of settings you just need a shared screen, avatars and 3D add nothing much of use. I hold daily work meetings, and audio is all I need 90% of the time, with screen sharing accounting for the rest.
I think conferences are a more promising thing to target, because there the ability to manipulate 3D objects, form spontaneous groups, overhear an ongoing conversation and join it, and just to randomly find people to hang out with without any fixed plan etc are all useful features to have. But people like interacting face to face, so VR conferences are still a bit of a hard sell. Now if you can't have a RL conference for whatever reason, things might turn out differently.
I think that's one area where our project shines. You can give a talk to a group of people, finish, and then just like at an in-person conference the audience members will hang around a bit, some will talk to others, and they'll socialize in pretty much the same ways people socialize in person. It works very naturally, without having to create private channels, exchange email addresses or anything formal like that. If you want to hear somebody better, you move closer to them. If you want less noise around you, you move away from the noise. In VR you can emote quite realistically, in fact one pretty cute and natural feature of the software is that if you want to establish a contact with another person, you just shake hands. Which in VR you do by performing the actual gesture.
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
People have been trying to do virtual meetings and conferences for a long time now. Second Life dabbled in it. High Fidelity started with a consumer oriented VR world, tried to pivot to business meetings, then died.
So far it hasn't succeeded, I suspect in good part because it's hard to improve on things like Zoom by adding 3D and VR on top. It adds extra difficulties, and in the vast majority of settings you just need a shared screen, avatars and 3D add nothing much of use. I hold daily work meetings, and audio is all I need 90% of the time, with screen sharing accounting for the rest.
I think conferences are a more promising thing to target, because there the ability to manipulate 3D objects, form spontaneous groups, overhear an ongoing conversation and join it, and just to randomly find people to hang out with without any fixed plan etc are all useful features to have. But people like interacting face to face, so VR conferences are still a bit of a hard sell. Now if you can't have a RL conference for whatever reason, things might turn out differently.
I think that's one area where our project shines. You can give a talk to a group of people, finish, and then just like at an in-person conference the audience members will hang around a bit, some will talk to others, and they'll socialize in pretty much the same ways people socialize in person. It works very naturally, without having to create private channels, exchange email addresses or anything formal like that. If you want to hear somebody better, you move closer to them. If you want less noise around you, you move away from the noise. In VR you can emote quite realistically, in fact one pretty cute and natural feature of the software is that if you want to establish a contact with another person, you just shake hands. Which in VR you do by performing the actual gesture.
A good FLOSS for online conferences that maybe even mimics the social/hallway aspects of conferences?
IRC & beer will do.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
Thanks, Jon for putting it up out of lots of mails exchange in lkml. But to me, this is the punchline "figuring things out is something we are good at" ...yup ..that's how this community thriving over the ages before the madness of flooding conferences everywhere with all diluted and useless stuff.
Another day Matthew(Willcox) was pointing "self-funded" conference attendance ...bloody hell.. I never had had the chance to fund myself to attend those glorious gatherings. Yup, you can term me a different way.
Nothing to complain much, as I never had the opportunity to meet so many good people in one place with my own money. That would be a desire but not dying for.
I don't know, how apt it would be concluded, that from an outsider(I mean not a conference attendees) point of view, I, personally, always rate LPC much much higher than other flashy conf...honestly.
LPC should be kept alive at any cost and kicking. But, the better heads should figure out how they can manage growing crowd. Mind you, if other conf, like LSFMM, those crowd might be thong into the LPC, like other conf who are thinking of stopping.
But, again, apt people at its disposal to control thing and again we are good at figuring out thing!!!
The short and long-term future of community conferences
Thank you for completely misinterpreting what I said.
For those currently attending LSFMM, it can be easier to get their employer to pay for them to attend a conference than it is for their employer to sponsor them. Different budgets, but it all comes from the same companies eventually. Sponsorship money can then be used to help those attend who would otherwise not be able to.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
Thank you for completely misinterpreting what I said.
For those currently attending LSFMM, it can be easier to get their employer to pay for them to attend a conference than it is for their employer to sponsor them. Different budgets, but it all comes from the same companies eventually. Sponsorship money can then be used to help those attend who would otherwise not be able to.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
"Thank you for completely misinterpreting what I said."
Sorry, Matthew! my bad ...sincere apology.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
"Thank you for completely misinterpreting what I said."
Sorry, Matthew! my bad ...sincere apology.
Talks vs Design Sessions
Regarding the "Why are we having talks" thing: for the last several years, the XenProject Design and Developer Summit has split our time 50/50 between talks and "design sessions". Design sessions are unconference-style sessions which anyone can propose. We even wrote a [1]custom webapp to make scheduling easier.
The basic idea is:
Anyone proposes a topic to discuss
Everyone goes and says how much they're interested in each topic
The computer tries to find a schedule to maximize everyone's happiness (where "happy" is "able to attend the topics they're interested in").
An example of last year's schedule can be found [2]here . We've found these sessions to be very useful.
At the moment the scheduling website is really just hacked together and not suitable for anyone else to use; but I'm hoping maybe this year to clean it up sufficiently that other communities could use it and adapt it to their own purposes.
[1] https://design-sessions.xenproject.org/
[2] https://design-sessions.xenproject.org/schedule
The short and long-term future of community conferences
Thanks to LWN's formidable coverage, I've never really felt the need try to make anyone pay for conference trips ;-) Maybe the community should explore this avenue more and provide more support (of what kind soever) to journalism. After all, it's an established and mostly functional concept in the wider society.
The short and long-term future of community conferences
[1]IETF 107 was just canceled too. We'll see what happens with the all-remote conference.
[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/XenAlx4Nw6Jmg69QpXRUOwbzsXY/