Two days ago, O’Reilly announced that all future in-person conferences organised by the company have been cancelled. Instead, they might organise more large-scale online-only events. This came as a huge shock to me. Over the years I have only been to two O’Reilly events (with EuroOSCON being my first real software conference back in 2005) and I still have “Attend OSCON” on my bucket list. I guess I have to remove that item now and I wish everyone who’s now without a job good luck in the future and big thanks for your work!
Most recent open source conferences (and some even going back years and years and years) already have been streaming talks and offering recordings and handling live-feedback should also be solvable through services like Slido or simply having a moderated chat channel. There’s one aspect of a conference an online-event cannot replicate: sprints. Sure, you can do online coding sessions but it’s not the same as sitting with 40 people in the same room and just moving from table to table to learn something new. Oh, I miss PyCon and GopherCon so much 😢
Perhaps in the future, we will see more online events with world-wide connected coding sessions with satellite events that are connected through video calls or something like that😉 I think I’d really enjoy such an event 🙂
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