Online conferences in lockdown times.
Recently in the Drupal Conference organiser workgroup on slack shared an interesting google sheet that was shared by the WordPress community. So i watched all of the promo videos and highlight some here to conceptualize an online conference in these times of lockdown.
Time is of the essence, for every one of us has to cope with either work, home schooling and/or other important tasks in life. While at the same time attend a conference, share ideas and be happy and eager to learn and grow further.
in current times it’s not too hard to setup a service with proper authentication and web calling: Open source RTMP and webRTC have grown from infant hacks into serious technologies that can compete or even be better then proprietary systems like hangouts, ms teams or not mentioned explicitly zoom.
It is very disturbing that some of the most expensive systems use zoom in their core,
The first platform that stood out is Remo. it is a good concept for Contribution Days or for creating networking opportunities during an online event.
It allows to have virtual booths for sponsors and is limited to 800 participants and only one live stream.
Costs can add up quickly for longer events, there is a monthly subscription that allows for a limited number of hours. Internally the WebRTC looks like jitsi or janus.
It wouldn’t take more then 2 components to have this in our cms :)
Next one that stood out is the most expensive one of all: vFairs who make a virtualised conference hall with sponsor booths and all, some parts are easy to add to a business model here, but.
“Rooms and paralel session slots are not relevant any more, only availability of audience is.”
Therefore we should only use selection committees for featured speakers and let voting and organic growth take care of room capacity.
In current times people have limited time available during a minimum 24h event, due to sleep, homeschooling, work and other tasks.
“These kind of concepts are nice in the same timezone, but not in realtime.”
Now we have to compe with 3x the usual 8h times of availibility and at the same time react to local disruptions, it used to be that we fly to a place and only be distracted by secretly working.
I personally do not believe in the virtual 3d conference hall, but find the sponsor booth ideas appealing.
In all the off market solutions the hallway track is missing, or filtered as a networking lounge.
The real hallway track can only be virtualised in realtime, it is not orchestrated but organic.
One very negative downside on vFairs is that besides it cost it uses zoom to do the video conferencing, so this example is just shown for ideation, not for something sustainable.
In the next blog i’ll explain why this totally makes no-sense in current times.
As well as what and how we should experience virtual conferences.
