With everything going on in the world, sadly the normal “in person” Fedora conference, flock, had to be canceled. In it’s place a ‘all virtual’ conference was scheduled for Aug 7th through 9th: “nest with fedora”
Sadly the keynotes were all way too early for me to make it to live (4-5am my time is just too early), so I am going to catch those via recordings as soon as they are up. I did manage to make it to some sessions however.
First a quick note about the platform that was used: hopin.io. I’ve been to a number of virtual events of late, and most of them have not been that great. However, this time I was pleasantly surprised! hopin is actually pretty well done. There was a ‘reception’ area and a live chat for conference wide discussions, talks appeared a few minutes before their scheduled time to allow people to join and each talk had it’s own chat. Speakers could invite other people to join in the video chat part if they wanted. There was a conference wide ‘poll’ section with lots of silly polls in it for people to take. Mixed in the talks were some ‘hallway’ track places where everyone who joined could join via video. There was also a timed thing where you could get 5min with a random other person then it would switch everyone to the next person. Not as good as a real hallway track, but not bad given the constraints. Video and audio worked pretty well.
There was a number of nice talks I went to, as well as some fun ones (CPE put on a pub quiz and a bingo, both were great!).
Smooge and I gave a really quick talk about our recent Datacenter Move. I also thought the ‘meet your FESCo’ talk was interesting, there were some great questions.
All in all, not as good as a real conference, but a lot safer and easier and not too bad overall. 🙂 Many thanks to all the organizers!