!!Con 2020 Livestream [video]
bangbangcon.com
bangbangcon.com
This is our 7th year and our first time running it virtually. Happy to answer any questions about the conference. We’ll also be publishing our notes about how we ran a virtual conference afterward.
Hope you enjoy!
If you're interested in attending future !!Cons, sign up for our mailing list (on our website) and we'll let you know when tickets go on sale.
Personally, I think one problem with evaluating talks purely on written proposals is that the process misses out on whether a submitter is able to attract the audience's attention, and to convey their points within the allocated time.
Written proposals can be heavily edited; talks on stage (especially if there isn't a rehearsal beforehand — most conferences wouldn't have the resources to do this) can't.
I admire conferences that rigorously aim for blind selection to give all speaker candidates a fair chance, but I feel that the audience occasionally gets the short end of the stick with a bad presenter.
> So what would work better?
I think a two-pass approach could work better.
The first anonymised pass is for rating and commenting on the written talk proposals.
A second pass, with candidate names revealed, would help fine-tune the lineup and make sure that it's the best it can be. It could also include watching the candidate's talks at other conferences, to see if they're good at communicating their ideas.
They're on the Confreaks youtube channel, and we'll release individual talk videos a few weeks from now.