🩠COVID-19 has well and truly hit the tech scene this week. As well as being full of "WFH tips" for all the tech workers suddenly banished from their offices, my particular Twitter bubble is full of DevRel folk musing and debating about what this interruption means to our profession. For sure, in the short term, the Spring conference season is screwed— all the conferences are cancelled (or postponed).

But what about the future? No-one would ever want to take such a forced hiatus but what an excellent opportunity it is to take a step back and consider why we’re doing what we’re doing - and if we should go back to business as usual once things calm down.

Tech conferences: the good, the bad, and the damn ugly

Let’s get our definitions and context sorted first, because sometimes one person’s good is another’s bad. Here I’m talking from the point of view of the conference participant - the developer, the architect, the engineer. Things that make an excellent conference, in my experience, include:

  • great content

  • ring-fenced time to consume and discuss said content

  • opportunity to interact with the speakers and with other like-minded developers

  • safe & inclusive environment

There are lots of conferences that tick all these boxes, including (but not exclusively; sorry if I’ve left your favourite one out here) Devoxx, code.talks, JavaZone, QCon, Øredev, NDC, and Kafka Summit. The unifying factor across all these is that they are curated and designed for the benefit and edification of their audience. It’s not a coincidence that many are led by local user groups.

But
there are other conferences that have become—or maybe always were—a commercial enterprise based around vendor sponsorship and ticket sales, with the content and audience experience playing second fiddle to whatever the sponsors want to hawk. Many "pay-to-play" talks are not always as useful as those accepted on merit alone, nor are they always as well delivered.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for a conference to be commercially successful (from the point of view of the sponsors, marketing lead-gen, etc) whilst also providing a great experience for the audience. But, there is a significant tension that does not always play out to the benefit of those attending.

Do we even still need conferences IRL?

(IRL=In Real Life)

There’s a lot of justifiable excitement right now about the potential for what can be done online to replace the 🩠-forced cancellation of so many conferences. Why go to the hassle, and create such a huge carbon footprint, of flying half-way around the globe if you can do it from the comfort of your study?

I would love to see more conference-like experiences available online. There are some significant reasons for doing this:

  • Reduced travel costs

  • Reduced environmental impact of travel

  • By definition, the material can be recorded and so consumed asynchronously at the viewer’s leisure

  • More accessible to those who might be intimidated by the idea of attending an event in-person

  • More convenient to those who can’t commit the contiguous block of time necessary to attend a conference

But
there’s always a but


What’s so good about conferences, anyway?

People.

Interacting with people is why I travel for eight hours to speak to 100 people and then travel eight hours home again.

There’s a really good reason that the hallway track gets talked about so much. The hallway track is what people refer to when they’re talking about conversations they have in the hallway (hence the name) at a conference, between sessions, on the way to lunch, after the conference.

It more broadly covers just generally hanging out at a conference, grabbing a drink, heading to get some food, with people who are interested in the same technologies and ideas as you are—and now you’re in a place with no calls on your time other than to talk about this stuff and build relationships with other people. It’s where fun ideas are had, friendships are built, where an increased meaning to the eight hours a day we spend staring at a screen is given.

Other challenges for online events

These are not insurmountable, but they cannot be ignored.

  • How do you replicate the hallway track? How do you replicate the camaraderie and community of an in-person event with the shared experiences of the same crap conference food, inspiring keynote talks, fun parties, etc?

    • I grew up in the BBS era and subsequent IRC days of the internet, and there were chat-rooms and Usenet groups where you really got to know people, and communities genuinely formed. I know that communities can and do form online, but you have to find a way to cultivate and nurture them in a way that goes beyond sticking a chat window onto a webinar.

  • As a speaker being there in person with your audience makes it MUCH easier to read the room. Are people nodding and smiling and following along, or are they glued to their phones desperately waiting for the session to end? Are they looking perplexed and puzzled, or excited and engaged? This is infinitely easier to gauge in-person than it is in a virtual setting.

  • A conference that you physically attend is dedicated, ring fenced time. Perhaps it’s just me and poor discipline, but I always intend to watch the videos from a conference I didn’t make it to
​but I rarely do. At a conference, you’re there to learn and listen and talk, and everything else is relegated to waiting. Back at work, the risk is that consuming conference content becomes secondary and a “luxury” to do in between “real work”.

  • When you’re physically present at a conference, you’re on the same timezone, with far fewer demands on your time. The talks start at 07:30? Unconference is going on until 22:00? No problem. For a virtual event you’re at home/in the office, quite possibly in a different timezone, with the usual commute / school run / family interactions to attend to.

Are Tech Conferences Dead? No. But they might benefit from a bit of pruning.

In-Person and Online are not mutually exclusive. This is not a battle to be won and lost.

There is a frenzied and important discussion going on right now in the DevRel world and beyond about if and how you can replicate the meetup and conference experience online. My hope is that more events are enabled this way (for the reasons above). But these are simply another medium through which developers can participate and engage.

In-person conferences will always be a thing because most people value the face-to-face interactions. Maybe less frequently, maybe VendorConf will end up virtual, and that’s fine - but my view (and hope) is that when the dust has settled, there will be a 'correction' in the conference 'market'.

At the heart of in-person conferences are the social interactions and the passionate programmes curated to enable people to immerse themselves over the course of a day or more in the technology, the culture, the people. These conferences are the ones that happen by the sheer will-power and dedication of the organisers, and they happened before and will happen again đŸ€ž

Update 28 May 2020

So we’re two months into this new world now, and boy does it look different. Everyone’s off the road, everyone’s turning to other avenues for their content. Conferences are going online, postponing to 2021, or just cancelling entirely. O’Reilly, one of the biggest names in the tech conference space (organisers of OSCON, Strata, Velocity, etc etc) simply abandoned in-person conferences for good early on in all this.

Do I change my view on my summary above? No, and that’s not just because I’m stubborn 😉

I recently heard a really interesting talk from Lerika Mallayeva in which she talked about all the things DevGAMM had done to move their conference online and try to replicate the same great experience. It sounded brilliant. It sounded great. It sounded almost as good as being there in person. And that’s the kicker. Virtual conferences have many benefits (see above), but ultimately people are always going to want to interact in person to a greater or lesser extent. The future is going to be a hybrid approach. Thus:

In-Person and Online are not mutually exclusive. This is not a battle to be won and lost.

Software Circus

I attended my first ever virtual conference recently, Software Circus. I was interested in the conference, but also the experience as an attendee since I am really interested to see how this all pans out (per the discussion above).

I wasn’t familiar with Software Circus before (but I am now and will be looking out eagerly for it in the future!). I heard about it on Twitter and some of the well-known speakers in the line-up caught my eye.

  • It was free to attend, and this is huge. I would have to be 110% certain I wanted the experience if you asked me to hand over 💰💰💰. If it’s free there is zero risk in signing up. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see if in going online more conferences make the move to free content. After all, running a conference even online is not a zero-cost proposition, but if your sponsors can cover that, does it become more viable to offer free instead of as a profit-making venture?

  • The production quality was relatively low - and it didn’t matter. They were using Zoom with something in the background to stream it to both Youtube and the conference platform (brella), and many presenters used the virtual background which often chops off arms and hats off etc :

    sc01

    (yep it was a themed conference, and people got into the spirit of it)

    Why didn’t the quality matter? Because you could hear what people were saying, and what they were saying was excellent
​

  • Content is king, and this is going to be 💯the case online. At an in-person conference, a talk has to be pretty dire for people to walk out, but if your talk online sucks then people just close the window and possibly forget to reopen it again
​

  • As well as the content quality itself, it was very easy as an end-user to connect and consume. So long as the feed isn’t actually fubar, a low-friction experience that many people can experience (e.g. just load up YouTube) is IMO more important than a bells & whistles download-our-software for lots of features one

  • Online talks and conferences are forever flirting with the danger of turning into a Webinar in which [usually dull] content is delivered at a bored recipient and then everyone goes [or rather, stays] home. Software Circus did a good job at avoiding this in several ways:

    • The conference opened not with a yawn-yawn vendor keynote, but with two of the central organisers having a chat about the conference, content, bit of history to the community, and so on. You were made to feel part of it, and not just a consumer or pair of eyeballs.

    • The conference platform had a chat window at the side that people used to say 'hi' etc in, which again makes you feel part of it knowing that there are other people also attending even if you can’t see them

    • The conference had a clear hashtag that people used when tweeting about it. People tweet about in-person conferences too, and it’s even more important now (if tweeting is your thing). It’s also fun that whereas an in-person conf people see these twitter threads and get FOMO, with virtual ones they can actually decide there and then to go and join it!

  • A few ideas that occurred during and after the conference:

    • For every session in a conference catalogue, include a Add to calendar link. It’s way more likely that people are going to dip in-and-out of an online conference and so being able to add calendar entries easily (like, one click) makes it more likely they’ll not forget   For bonus points include in the calendar entry the direct URL for the session so that they don’t have to go hunting around when the time comes

    • Attendees are going to be world-wide, so list the timezone against every time in every page and communication. For bonus points hyperlink every time to something like WorldTimeBuddy so that people can quickly translate to their local TZ.

    • Also:

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