While at Goto Conf in Chicago today I had two thoughts while talking with Joe (@joelaha) while hanging out with Bridget (@bridgetkromhout) while waiting for Lena’s (@lenadroid) talk on “Distributed Data Stores on Kubernetes“. All that wrapped up into a few ideas for future conferences. Here, I present them to you dear readers, please lament, lamblast, lacerate, or decimate this list of groovy ideas I have. Comments welcome, or scream at me a tweet or two on Twitter @Adron!
Idea 1 – Burn ALL the Slide Decks
I want to run a conference, and am curious who’s with me, where nobody would use slides to present. We’ll just toss all that out the window and present straight code. If you need cats in your presentation we’ll do what we did at Node PDX last time, we’ll just HAVE CATS ON THE STAGE!
So often the bullet points and images and distractions of slide decks are truly just a crutch. I write this as I see the beautiful, amazingly designed, inspirational, artistic, and awesome slide deck that Lena has and don’t want to lose that. But the idea of transferring that type of energy into just the pure presentation of the ideas would be an interesting challenge that I suspect would enable speakers to create some truly amazing talks. That is, for those brave enough to accept such a challenge!
Idea 2 – Complete Blind Topic Only Talks
Who would be interested in going to a conference that is only talk details and does not show or list the speaker that will present the topic? Would you attend a conference purely on the ideas presented? What would be the side details of this that would encourage you to attend such a conference? I personally would be stoked to go to a conference that is purely ideas only, and we get to have a surprise when we show up and there’s the speaker, whoever it may be, that shall guide us into the topic!
Idea 3 – Ideas Challenged BATTLE!
Think Battle Bots! If you’re unaware of the craze around Battle Bots, check out the Wikipedia, @BattleBots for more! The idea, is basically instead of bots though, you’ve got an idea and someone may oppose this idea and wants to pick it apart, and you want to defend it. It might get a bit rough, but it also could be – we’d of course keep it civil – very interesting to ensure we’ve got no proverbial elephants left standing in the room! Just imagine combing through an idea with a whole room full of people while two experts take apart an idea from two distinct points of view?
These are just a few of the ideas for organizing and setting up some new conferences that don’t fall into the same rut of the existing conferences. But this isn’t all, as Lena wrapped her talk (and I wrapped up this post) I found myself in another conversation about chaps, leather, distributed systems, and the various disparity in distribution of products to leather shops and the distinct supply demand invariances of managing this data.
Ok, so that’s a lot to load up in that last sentence, derived from the conversation, that I may wrap up into another post. But that’s for another time. For now, throw some tweets at me @Adron or leave a comment or three about what you’d like to see in a conference that would break the staleness of the same ole’ same ole’. Cheers!
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