Scala Love Conference Debrief

[jducoeur]

Yesterday was the Scala Love Conference. While it's fresh in my mind, here's a braindump. (Including a bit of compare-and-contrast with NE Scala last month.)

(Note: I was a "track owner" -- basically moderating and managing one of the tracks for three hours -- but wasn't core staff on this one.)

First, the name. Yes, I'm sure that some people will snicker, but it's quite intentional. Scala Love, both as an organization and as a conference, is very determinedly positive. The tracks were named "Joy" and "Happiness"; when the conference filled up, they added a new track named "Harmony". In a time of crisis, keeping a good attitude matters, and I think that helped influence a determinedly friendly and open conference.

The conference was entirely online, of course. We used several technologies:

• The presentations were done as Zoom Webinars.
• The breakouts and Q&A were done with Zoom Rooms.
• The livestream was via Twitch.
• Text chat before, during, and after the conference happened in Slack.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that no one system is really much good at all the different modes needed for an online conference. The best experiences, at least for anything serious, usually involve several different systems.

(Heck, even our D&D table has wound up involving Discord, D&D Beyond, Roll20, and Google Meet. Each does one aspect well, so we just combine them all to suit our needs.)

Scala Love 2020 was thrown together astonishingly fast -- as far as I can tell, they started working on it after NE Scala (five weeks and a geologic eon ago). Despite that, they sold out a thousand tickets (limited by the maximum capacity of the Zoom Webinar plan we were on), plus a bunch more folks joining via livestream, pulled together a truly remarkable speaker lineup, and wound up probably being the important conference for this community this year. There are logistics involved in running something like this online, but they can be juggled much faster than for a face-to-face (f2f) conference.

The conference was free, with an optional donation: I'm not sure whether it broke even, but it wouldn't surprise me. So another lesson is that while doing something serious online does cost some money, it is vastly cheaper than a real-world site, catering, A/V and so on typically are.

The conference was pretty much worldwide, officially starting in Central European Time and finishing in Pacific Time -- 14 continuous hours -- with speakers joining us from, I believe, four continents. Since the conference was free, and folks didn't have to travel, that meant that we largely had people joining on their own time and their own dime, rather than requiring their employers to send them. The result was that this was very much an enthusiast's conference, not needing corporate sponsorship and the like.

Having a public livestream was great, and something you can do when you don't need to recoup a ton of money. In practice, it appeared that even a large fraction of the ticket-holders decided to watch via Twitch instead of Zoom, probably because it's much easier if you're mostly just watching. (Anecdotally, we seemed to usually have 30-70 people attending each track via Zoom, and 200-400 on Twitch at any given time.)

An important general observation: audience members like to talk. This is something I've observed at both NE Scala and Scala Love. At a f2f conference, you have to shush the room so that everybody can hear the panelists, but online you have text chat available, and people use that. You wind up with discussions of the topic happening in the background, people asking each other questions, and even just occasional general snark: the result is a lively environment, in a way that you don't get f2f.

NE Scala used Slack for text chat, where Scala Love used to Twitch chat attached to each livestream channel -- IMO, Slack worked better, simply because it's a richer chat environment. (Zoom's own chat feature is notably terrible, not least because you can't see anything that was said before you entered the room.) But I strongly recommend encouraging this, albeit with somebody keeping an eye on it for possible abuse.

The text chat is especially important, since that's where the audience can provide feedback. Lacking the immediacy of applause, both conferences did it via chat. NE Scala officially encouraged emoji-based applause in one of the Slack channels (I found an animated "inclusive clap" multi-skin-tone emoji that worked really nicely); at Scala Love, we mostly had impromptu cheering in the Twitch chat. Either way, it's important for helping the presenters feel appreciated.

Having a moderator overseeing each session is especially important when you are running something like this. They need to do a bunch of things, including:

• Help the presenters get their tech set up, do sound checks, and so on.
• Pay attention to all the various commentary channels (in this case, Zoom Chat, Zoom Q&A, Twitch Chat and Slack), to see if folks have questions.
• Keep an eye on the time.
• Generally emcee the session.

One of the really smart innovations at Scala Love was to have breakout rooms, officially assigned to match the webinar rooms. At the end of each presentation, the track owner's job was to shoo everyone -- presenter and audience -- over to the appropriate breakout room. This allowed us to emulate the way that, at a f2f conference, a bunch of people usually want to congregate around the presenters, ask questions, and discuss the subject further. It made the event much more participatory and friendly. And as an added bonus, it got everyone out of the main webinar, so that we could start setting up the next presentation.

These breakout rooms do want, if not moderation per se, at least someone keeping half an eye on each one, making sure everyone plays nice and reminding everyone when the next session is going to start. This takes some people points, but seemed like a good idea.

Since most people aren't used to the tech yet, Scala Love held several practice sessions in advance, and asked all of the track owners and presenters to attend at least one if possible. This was a really good idea, letting us iron out most of the kinks in advance and helping things run well day-of.

Overall, it was impressively great: a solidly good conference by any metric, and an astonishingly good one for a "let's build a barn!" project thrown together in a month. Yes, it didn't have quite the same vibe and hallway chatter of a f2f conference, but it was vastly cheaper and easier to run, just as professional and informative, friendlier and more welcoming than the official ScalaDays conferences that it effectively replaced this year.

The main takeaway is that I think, even when the current crisis is over, online conferences are here to stay, and even f2f ones should be thinking seriously about how to run in a hybrid mode. It loses some things, but it definitely gains others. And it is not crazy-hard, so give it serious consideration...