Show HN: Sleepy Time Conference—conferences that comes together while you sleep | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sleepy Time Conference—conferences that comes together while you sleep

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31 pointsbreck24 comments

The problem is real, but I don't think this is the solution.

The point of conferences is discussing ideas, which asynchronously is hard to say the least. Remote conferencing is already a big step down compared to in person conferences. Doing them asynchronously I fear that would put the last nail on the coffin.

What if there were a slack/like discussions section with threaded conversations?

It wouldn't be exactly like an old-school conference, but I feel like it would have it's place as a medium for exchanging ideas.

How does this idea differ from "a web forum" (or like, reddit/HN ;P)?

I've actually been working on something like that, with elements similar to the submission idea.

My thing is an irc/slack-like chat system, that allows you to leave both text and audio messages (which get auto-transcribed) in the same chat channel, so you can have asynchronous audio conversations blended with traditional async text chats.

As a play on async, it's called heysync[1]. It isn't ready for people to use yet, and it's also made more for 'work communication', as opposed to conferences, but it's very neat to see different takes on asynchronous communications coming up over time.

1 - https://heysync.chat

No matter what you build it is so completely different than being able to walk around a room and strike up a conversation. There just isn't a comparison to real human interaction, and I think at this point in the zoom era with a widespread feeling of a lack of connectedness with online platforms, we can all admit that.

Really? I'm doing that all the time over zoom. Calling people and groups together for a quick, hey what's up and then talk about what has been on my mind and usually all my colleagues jump in too ans after 15-20 min we break up and go back to do our jobs.

I think to blame tech for the problem with connectedness is only one part of the problem.

I agree! My point is that there’s a place for both.

Experience from FOSDEM that happened last weekend: all talks had been pre-recorded and started exactly on time. During the talk, an active room of chat discussion. At the the end of the talks, speakers join the room to address (some of) the questions that have been raised and not already answered. Then, a separate video-conference room becomes available, for anyone who wants to continue discussing with the presenters, while the next talk starts.

The combination of prepared (async) presentations and live (synchronous) QnA sessions was a sweet spot.

And the scale... 774 talks in 108 different "rooms" (and a video-conference after each one of them). All implemented with Free Software.

The description mentions that questioners can also record questions... But how can you record questions for a talk that has not happened yet? And if you hypothetically did wouldn't the result be extremely jarring/annoying for viewers of the final montage (as likely most questions would be answered by the talk anyway - or even worse be way off topic)? Are the speakers supposed to watch the whole in-progress montage immediately before their talk to catch the questions? And what about questioners that send the questions after the talk, will there be a second round offset by 24 hours?

Actually, having QnA sessions not immediately after the talk sounds kind of useful. It allows gathering of ideas, and an actual discussion after consulting external facts. Talking to people at their poster during poster hours can be much more useful than the hurried QnA at the end of a talk.

The ad-hoc live Q&A is always kind of a disaster. I think it’s more useful to the audience and the speaker to do an AMA kind of thing. Questions are open for a couple hours, and the top X will be answered on video.

Why is this better than everybody just recording their stuff and sending it?

Because

1.- speakers do not need to know how to record their stuff and send it by some means.

2.- There is no need of somebody putting them all together before broadcasting.

As far as I understand, both processes are automated so that speakers just open the web app and record, and everything is ready on time.

Maybe it’d be a nice feature for services like Streamyard, allowing to introduce recorded videos in live events.

So instead of having to learn how to use recording software of some kind, they have to learn how to use this application, just for this one specific reason. I get the Idea, but i personally strongly dislike having to use lost of different app, which solve only one minor problem. But maybe this problem is way bigger for other people than it is for me, and i just underestimate the dimension of it.

I’d suggest cancelling the conference altogether.

One challenge that I feel like virtual conferences have to overcome is that they currently feel like far more of a distraction than their in-person equivalent. There was at least a social construct of “oh, the dev team is at a conference this week.” Now, it feels like a complete indulgence to spend a day watching conference talk videos.

To author, idea is cool. Any asynchronous communication helps to manage time and resources. But I believe there are some things that cannot be asynchronous. Conferences are meant to be interactive and collaborative. Pre-recorded sessions concepts already exists. For office communication, Slack and Loom are already doing good jobs.

I came across an app called TeamFlow, advertised at work teams, recently - it tries to use 'location' in the fake rooms to let you hear only a selection of other users. I haven't used it but I wonder if that could be adapted to a virtual conference environment.

I think this is slightly off-topic, as TeamFlow doesn't address big time zone differences AFAIK, but now that you've brought it up I have to say I have used TeamFlow. It's a pretty amazing product. Would highly recommend.

yes, a bit of a tangent into virtual conferences generally.

What if the last person needs to respond to what the first person said in a way it'd change what other people said? I mean, I'm not sure if this is a serious idea or tongue-in-cheek...

A: Let's do X

B: To do X, we need to Y.

C: To do Y, we need to Z.

D: We cannot do X because of ... Let's do T instead.

(entire 24 hour wasted?)

E: actuality we’ve just found a way to do X. 24 hours regained!!

When I need to travel to an international conference around the world, I'm usually severely jet lagged and tired anyway. I bet people would mostly rather stay up late or get up early in order to get to speak to others synchronously.

Why not just post a Scrum update or a video to or message to a slack update channel. This is silly

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