On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 3:55 PM Alasdair G Kergon <agk@fosdem.org> wrote:
The plan is for the presentations to be streamed from pre-recordedings to make sure that that part runs as smoothly as possible, but to have live textual chat during the presentations and live video Q&A and discussion afterwards.
i can say that this is how XDC2020 was conducted (using freenode irc for chat). it was - and i am not kidding here - the best "conference" i have ever been to. far, *far* better than *any* "live" conference and i have been to several, in the past 25 years. why? it was very simple: i was able, during my *own talk*, to chat with the other attendees and give them "running commentary" (plus explanations of things i had missed, or stuff i knew was coming up). far from being a distraction this resulted in a lively debate, questions, jokes, quips and people wishing to engage and talk in break-out rooms, one of them for longer than the actual talk. i came away from the whole experience going "wow that was utterly frickin awesome and valuable". by total contrast, two other "online" conferences forced me to use a web-based system, with *no* fallback position for either chat or audio. despite warning the organisers that i would be unable to interact with anyone, and would be unable even to hear audio (i run jackd for real-time music composition: it prevents and prohibits *both* firefox *and* chrome from playing audio), they said - and this is not a joke: "we looked at it and we found nobody else with problems. we therefore conclude that because you are in the minority, we can't be bothered. if you have audio problems, you get to fix them yourself: sorry, but basically we don't care". as a result, one of them i didn't even bother to log in to hear my own talk. i leave those two wildly diametrically opposed experiences with you to consider. l.