Timing

Naturally, the time for "social distancing" comes shortly after I have the epiphany that I desperately need more in-person social life. Sigh.

On the bright side, at least it waited until the end of Crazy Season. For reasons that aren't at all obvious, my High-Impact Social clusters extremely strongly in Q1 -- this weekend is the ninth big gathering I've been to in the first 13 weekends of the year. Of all of that, NE Scala (happening right now) is probably the only one that could become an all-online occasion, and it's the last one for a little while. So in practice, I'm not missing out on the big stuff, at least for the moment.

(Thank heavens Black Rose slid in under the wire before things got bad: that's been one of the highlights of my year for my entire adult life, and I would have been Sad if it had to be cancelled.)

As for NE Scala, Day One went pretty well -- a few minor hiccups here and there, but really not any more than we normally have at the in-person version of the conference. We got a few cancellations (one or two of them cranky about the change to online-only), but they were largely balanced by last-minute joins (apparently people who decided that the online conference was more feasible for them than in-person would have been anyway), and most of the audience seemed to appreciate that we managed to strike a balance between a possibly-irresponsible in-person gathering and cancelling outright. It seems to be serving as a useful proof of concept that yes, you can have a reasonably effective "gathering" via Zoom and Slack, and even preserve at least some of the social component, if you think about it right.

Now to hoping that the various aspects of "online" manage to stand up to the coming strain...