Southeast Linux Conference Feedback

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The southeast linux conference is currently under way. Please consider taking their SELF-specific survey to help us with statistics and what content you’d like to see!

You can get more info https://southeastlinuxfest.org/ and watch it live.

The wonderful people at SELF had to scramble last minute to put the event together last minute. We are building an open source conference model, so for that we at Geekbeacon ask:

1. What do you think could have been “better” in the context of hosting an open source conference?

2. What is your recipe/cookbook on how to put on a similar ‘open’ event again without having to figure everything out again, or start from scratch?

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I’ll start us off, https://github.com/pinax/symposion is an open source web framework designed for conferences. It was written for PyCon but can be re-used again and again by anyone who wishes to setup a conference. What is everyone else thoughts and ideas?

Any other tools that we should add to the list? I’d love to create something similar to docs.geekbeacon.org but specifically for putting on a virtual con. Your Intro Guide to Going Virtual in the post-apocalyptic world.

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Too many chat clients could we limit ourselves to 2 at the most?

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God yes!!! One and a backup would be my vote.

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Another thing as a mod That would be nice to have which is less of an issue but submitting URLS to be broadcasted.

submit once and have a bot post telegram, IRC, etc. Possibly do social would be great.

Bans / kicks would be nice to only have to do this once which isn’t an issue if we only have 1 or 2 chats and not 4. :>

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#Structure
It would be nice to have some kind of moderated hand thing, we have two people pretty much dominating the entire discussion. Using hands in jitsi/moderating who an speak would also be more diverse in opinions.

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I felt discounted during last nights chat(prior to the gaming). I think the problem was there was no cuing when it was appropriate to speak, and when to not. The discussion got quite passionate, and I felt I had something to add to the content, but was unable to since I didn’t know the appropriate netiquette in order to inject views verbally. It would be very helpful for those of us with social cue issues. Perhaps a written document describing appropriate ways to interject during a jitsi meeting?

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I agree on the issue of too many chats. if I count right, we had IRC, telegram, matrix, and jitsi.
I’d always stick to IRC as main chat, and another secondary, voice enabled one.

There is just one thing I mentioned a few times in the chat - the audio. during the conference there was about every 1-2 minutes an about 5 second jitter. didn’t matter if Noah, Nixie or one of the speakers were active.
During the destination linux live podcast at the end there was no audio issue at all (except the missing video at the beginning :wink: )

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Here’s my cliff-notes on what would be great to happen to make this go better.

  1. Web Framework to roll out a Conference website. (That’s speaker bio, user/attendee registration, calendar, schedule, updates, events, etc… and easy updates as we have more info to push details to share with everyone.
  2. Chat: I would argue having just one is all you need but if you have 2 sync between chats. Depending on size of the con.
  3. Updates announcements. There should be a way to reach all your registered users and let them now of major updates changes etc. Ideally this is a push (ie email) over pull (tweet)
  4. Ability to roll up services as needed. RTMP server, collaboration documents, Mailing Lists on demand, etc. ie.

Items below will vary greatly on the conference and type.

  1. Tooling / Guidelines on how to behave , code of conduct, expectation on hangouts and so on. Is everyone interacting by voice? should people be quiet till called upon?
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I think Matrix let you connect to IRC, I don’t know if it had its own seperate chat though - most voice chat programs have.
Matrix isn’t really on my list of “things to try out” since I’m not really someone who likes to talk to people I don’t know (irl), especially in a language I have issues not understanding everything, mainly if people have either strong accents or speak very fast.

edit:
In its functionality, IRC is pure as it can get (don’t count DDC) and for basic chatting a lot of web clients are available. Most distros even have an IRC client installed by default or available in their standard repos. With most IRC networks having services (be it anope, atheme or others) moderation is definitely manageable (and rather easy) if you know some basic stuff about channel modes.
Also, our “original chat” was also IRC, and I just like it.
If discord is gone in 5 or 20 years, we can still set up an IRC server with all the channels :smiley: