@rozina It's all about ENGAGEMENT 😂

I sign into LinkedIn for the first time in a while and the 'news' bit throws up this gem

York train station

York Minster

Street in York

Wallpaper in Malmaison, York

Pigeon on top of doorway to old church in York

Spent a night in York to celebrate it being 20 years since my wife and I got engaged (and to take her mind off my mother-in-law passing away a year ago today)

@katebowles Google Docs has it built in I think?

My daughter has been asked to wear red, white, and blue today and take a plate of cakes to school for a picnic to celebrate the monarch's jubilee. I tried to convince her to wear black and say she's an anarchist, but she was having none of it.

Kids these days, eh?

@clacke @mguhlin Like I said, there's not many. From what I see, things like FOSDEM? In my area, I guess ALT.

@mguhlin cont...

4. Present the audience with radically different ideas, including ones that they might not like (I feel that previous iterations of this conference did this better)

5. Have a theme for days or, even better, chunks of the day so people can use their time wisely.

6. Provide space for people who want to duck out of sessions and just chat.

7. Recognise the wisdom and talent in the audience rather just who happens to be on the stage.

(I could keep going...)

@mguhlin I wrote this: https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2022/05/20/running-event/

@mguhlin I may well do! Thanks for your list 😄

@basil Of course not! Just how great it is to be able to track down Nazi war criminals.

@basil But completely unproblematised, even though the speaker was relatively dark-skinned and of Asian heritage.

I guess there's only so much you can get across in a short space of time, and the event was quite celebratory of tech (esp. Silicon Valley-style) but still...

@humanetech Yeah, I'm saying it facetiously and it's not just the Fediverse (I set up a co-op in 2016!)

It's more like I've found my people. And they're not funded by VCs 😂

@mguhlin Oh wow, there's a blog post in that!

But off the top of my head:

1. Participatory sessions. They don't all have to be workshops, but some method for audience Q&A

2. Explicitly state what's in and out of scope for the conference. Bonus points for articulating the assumptions that conference organisers are making (e.g. Venture Capital is a good thing)

3. Ensure a visibly-diverse range of speakers so that people feel represented. White middle-aged guys don't have more ideas.

I bought the ticket for this conference in 2019 and, as I said in the first post in this thread, I've changed a lot and so has the world since then.

I'm not sure I'll buy a ticket for next year. For me, there were such huge problems with what was being celebrated in most of the sessions.

Perhaps my worldview has completely flipped. Perhaps I've been radicalised by the Fediverse 😂

Post-lunch start-up competition includes all-white company (and board) pitching for a proprietary(?) 3D-printed projector(!) + resource hub for schools in Africa. Mad.