The "Hallway Track" is my favourite thing about conferences. By far the best one of those I've had, so far, is at Functional Conf 2022 online edition (because of you know what), where I ended up hanging out for almost six hours with a bunch of APL nerds discussing APL, Life, The Universe and Everything in one of the "breakout rooms" of their conference software.
Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city/country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff.
I do love in-person gatherings and online ones, when done right, both cases.
Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can't (and vice-versa).
Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.
Also it's be nice to see a feature where you can 'queue up' to speak 1:1 with the speaker after the general discussion. This could be like a lottery where whoever gets in line gets paired with the speaker for 60 seconds of chat and then it goes to the next person.
> Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.
Agreed. This is so much better than having to watch live talks of people stumbling with their camera setup causing the Q&A to be canceled because of that.
when i spoke at an online conference in india i insisted that my talk be prerecorded to make sure there were no interruptions since i was worried that from china the quality might suffer some times. i sent the talk to the organizers to stream and after the talk we did a live q&a. i don't know if the participants felt a difference, but i thought it was the prudent thing to do.
That's very smart. You could even be in the q&a during the talk answering questions while pre-recorded-you is still speaking! This could give a lot more time for focused interaction.
Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city/country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff.
I do love in-person gatherings and online ones, when done right, both cases.
Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can't (and vice-versa).
Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.