What I'm spending my fall doing

[jducoeur]

I've spent today trying not to be depressed about the news by making one last large donation to the presidential and senatorial funds, and otherwise working on Arisia. Which reminds me that I've been remiss in my diarizing.

So -- a few weeks ago, I was invited to become the Div Head for the new Arisia Remote Conference division. Now that we are confident that (a) Arisia will be entirely online next year and (b) Marriott Corp isn't going to sue us for not using the hotel, that's starting to seriously ramp up.

Basically, I'm in charge of making Arisia as a 100% virtual convention possible. The new division will be basically in charge of the online infrastructure, working with all the other divisions to produce the best experience we can.

In principle, there's no longer anything revolutionary about that. Ever since the pandemic hit and conferences starting moving online (starting with NE Scala, which we turned into an online conference on 48 hours' notice), there have been many proofs of concept -- we know this can be done.

That said, we have a lot more than 48 hours here: we've got four months, enough time to do this right. Some v-cons have been better, some worse, but I haven't heard of any that were really excellent yet, so I think there's still a lot of room for learning and experimentation.

Which is where y'all come in.

First of all, I need help with this. Lots and lots of help. I need IT/Ops help (Ops is not my specialty), I need some adventurous programmers who are interested in helping with this new platform I'm going to be building, I need web designers to make this pretty, I need UX designers to make it usable -- heck, I could use a good project manager so that I don't have to do all that myself. If you'd been interested in getting involved with the project, drop me a line.

Second, your thoughts would be welcome. If you've been to any online conferences or conventions this year, tell me what you thought worked, and what didn't. If you have crazy ideas for how to do things better, talk to me. While we're constrained by available time and labor, I am totally hoping to be able to do some Mad Science here, and Show Them All How It's Done. (Bwahahaha, but seriously -- I think there are a lot of ways we can improve on the state of the art, and produce some great open-source stuff.)

The goal is to not just have an adequate Arisia this year, but to have a great one -- to help folks come together and have a really good time. If you're interested in joining in on that, or even just have ideas, I'd love to hear from you, in comments or privately.