[OSGeo-Discuss] [OSGeo-Conf] Announcement: Call for Location global FOSS4G 2023

[María Arias de Reyna]

Hi,

This is my personal opinion as co-chair of FOSS4G 2021 and not any
official OSGeo statement. Take it with a grain of salt. I am still
recovering from the burnout of organizing it, so I may be very biased
:)

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 3:42 PM Jonathan Moules via Discuss
<discuss at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
> Why? If it can be held in a virtual format then surely that's better
> than an in-person event?

Better is a subjective term. It is better in some aspects, it is worse
in some others. When we changed FOSS4G 2021 to the online version, we
researched as much as we could about how to do it properly. And though
I still need to write a second part post-event of this post[1] it
summarized concerns that are really not fully solved in an online
event. Most of the points stated there still stand.

I would advocate to have both, online and face to face, maybe on
alternate years, maybe adding as a "fourth" option on the rotation.
Online is good, but in my opinion, it can't replace all in person
events. And that hurts to say.

> Online is more accessible,

Depends on how you measure accessible.

Not everybody has the network bandwidth or hardware to attend an
online event, to name the most obvious one. But they may take a train
or bus and go to the venue.

And don't let me start with streaming services that ban certain
countries. Because for example if you are streaming from USA, there
are several countries that can't watch it. Period. By law. Safest
place to stream from is Europe, which usually adds up to the bill. Or
you stream from several locations, which adds complexity.

What about communicating in a foreign language with all the body
language missing? Not everyone is fluent in English. But when you are
physically there, you can read clues on body language and you can use
other methods to complement the English you are not fully
understanding. That's missing on online events. May be minor to native
speakers, but it makes the event less accessible to some people.

Timezones are a nightmare too. Many people can travel and adapt to the
timezone of the venue, but if you don't travel, some people find it
hard to adapt to the timezone. Imagine you live with kids. Are you
going to stay awake and sleep during the day without that affecting
either you or them? It can be done, but saying "more accessible" as a
blank statement is subjective. It has its difficulties.

I agree that depending on the venue (is it accessible to wheelchairs?
does the catering have allergy options? can you reach it walking or on
public transport?) or the country chosen (can you get a VISA or are
you in danger for being LGBTQ+?), it may be better to do it online,
sure thing. But you have to go case by case. No generalizations here.

> cheaper,

This really depends on how good you want your event to be. You can
have a free event (on Twitch or YouTube and expect ads in between
talks) or you can pay for a good platform that offers services useful
to make the conference better. How many of these services do you want?
Did you like the social map from 2021? Was it too much? Do you want to
have private video chats? What else can you add? Maybe some virtual
reality room for the gala dinner?

We ended up having a good price for all of this, but at a cost of a
lot of volunteering work. Exhausting volunteering work that wouldn't
have been required on a face to face version.

> and the
> massive environmental impact of several hundred people flying to an
> arbitrary point on the globe

With this I agree 100%.

> Now is a good opportunity to re-evaluate the need for it to be in-person
> given the evident success of 2021's online event.
>
>
> It strikes me that online has numerous advantages:
>
> * Cheaper to attend

Usually true (and true in our case), but I wouldn't count on that as
another generalization without looking at close numbers.

> * Cheaper to organise

This depends a lot on where you organize it face to face and how you
organize it online.

> * Easier to organise (? a supposition)

Well, I have found the online version much much much harder to
organize than similar conferences in person. Just because on the
online version there is absolutely no room to improvise, you have to
have everything completely tied before the event. And have a backup
plan. And a backup plan for the backup plan. And then maybe a third
backup plan. And then during the event you will run out of backup
plans and your only choice will be to shrug very hard.

The moderator is missing because whatever personal issues.
F2F: Anyone else in the room can act as moderator
Online: Who has privileges to be a moderator in this room? Anyone?
Someone? Are all the backup moderators busy somewhere else? How many
rooms are on fire right now? Who can we speed up and teach how the
controls work in less than five minutes?

I want to thank again the amazing work of the horde of volunteers that
moderated this 2021. And even when they were a huge amazing group and
did their best, and we had a huge pool of backups, there were many
issues. I ended up moderating a room and believe me when I say, that
was the backup elevated to ten plan at least. Did one room more fail
at the same time and we would have had to cancel one of the rooms.

This person forgot to buy the right ticket/don't have a ticket/don't
know how to login to the platform and can't access the room they
should be in.
F2F: Open the door.
Online: Oh, damn, let me find someone with admin privileges so you can access.

Because, you know, your group of people with admin privileges will be
busy taking care of fires somewhere else.

Does the mic fail?
F2F: Speak louder while someone runs to grab another mic.
Online: Well, skip the talk, whatever.

Your streaming service is down. This happens, In 2021 I moderated two
conferences with this issue. Bye bye AWS for several hours.
F2F: We will upload the recordings later. No worries.
Online: Oh, our backup streaming service runs also on AWS? Well, skip
the conference, whatever. See you next year. Such fun!

Or maybe the speaker lose the network at the worst possible time or
the bandwidth fails or they didn't do as requested and didn't check
their hardware and software was working,... And there's nothing you
can do about it except cancel the talk.

> * Open to many more delegates (several billion)

I like your enthusiasm, but we don't have that many potential
attendees :) I seriously think we reached close to our real potential
in 2021 which was around 1900 attendees (after removing duplicated
accounts). Maybe we can get to 3000 or 4000 on a good year, but not
much more.

> * Open to many more disadvantaged delegates

While leaving others out... So better to alternate so people can go at
least to one event every N years.

> * Much lower environmental impact

So true. This stands high up.

The TL;DR version of this would be that if you think online is better,
please send your proposal for an online version. But without all the
previous email that may sound rude or aggressive. It is not. I would
really like to have at least one online option available to choose
from.

Cheers,
María.


[1] https://delawen.com/2020/10/are-online-events-the-new-normal/