Conferences, or crisis sometimes equals opportunity

I was reading this: https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences

and thinking…if it gets to be more common practice for people to organize virtual conferences and if the tools and people’s level of experience with them improves…it would be great to have a virtual Purescript conference sometime.

i know that at the company i contract to, which is completely remote / distributed, we’re having to replace our semi-annual get together with Zoom and…it’s not that bad. Particularly white-boarding from an iPad.

thoughts?

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Have you seen this?

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The biggest limitation for me with this particular meetup is the time zone difference. Otherwise, I would like to attend.

@afc I saw on the Haskell slack channel that some people had started a live chat via Zulip. PureScript also has such a channel. Perhaps as a way to build momentum for this, someone just start a live chat over there and see who joins?

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Thanks for the replies, @daveman1010221 and @JordanMartinez - both interesting avenues but neither what i had in mind…i should have been clearer!

What i was thinking was that as real-world, existing conferences are forced to invent procedures and adopt technologies to adapt to an era of social distancing and more difficult international travel it may be that putting on a small conference that looks and feels like one of these larger, existing conferences becomes easier and that we in the PureScript community(ies) could benefit from that.

Something like a one day virtual conference, with prepared talks and / or workshops, recorded so that they could live on in YouTube as a resource. Wouldn’t have to be that many talks and maybe not even all new talks…if @natefaubion would just reprise his excellent talks from the “purescript unscripted” virtual meets that would be great. I’d be happy to give a talk myself, or even just do some kind of AMA panel on experiences building real world applications with PureScript. The vast wealth of pedagogical material that @thomashoneyman and @JordanMartinez have accumulated would also seem (to me) to be leverage-able into workshops or talks (even just a talk that surveys the material that’s out there and orients people towards it). And there’s so many talks and blog posts spread across a variety of places from @justinw

So this was intended to plant a seed for people to think about, something we could plan towards, coordinate perhaps with a particular release (like 1.0 potentially) that would create some buzz about the language at a time when it is in good shape for people to look at it.

I think, as i write this, that i’m almost talking more about the value of putting a bow on a lot of the work that’s in progress to make it visible than generating work for anybody, since we’re all busy with things, noone moreso than the core team, i imagine.

does this spark any interest in folks?

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I was talking with a friend from another language community yesterday, and they shared that what has worked nicely for them to replace the conference/meetup feeling was just to set up a videocall and announce it on their Slack so that people could just join and present something.

I liked the idea so I’d like to host this kind of call to have a small “PureScript online meetup”.

Logistics: I was thinking about some time on Friday evening UTC so it’s comfortable for both EU and US, and I did not pick the provider yet, so not sure about the participant limit (IIRC Hangouts limits to 25 people, and Zoom to 100).
I also would not like to have a structure, but of course if you’d like to join you could think of something you’d like to present to everyone - but no worries if you don’t have anything, we have a huge fallback topic which is “how do you feel in the current climate and how has this crisis impacted your life”, so I’m not worried about us filling the available time :slight_smile:

If you’re interested about joining this kind of thing just like this post - I’ll check back in 12h and if we have at least some interest I’ll schedule and announce this properly :heart:

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The timing of the MeetLambda schedule was set before the lockdown, in order to meet the availability of a room and the needs of the people initially interested in joining; but that was meant to be a very local event.
Since going online, we kept the same schedule, but we would be pleased to reconsider it, if more people could be interested in participating.

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I’m interested in both - more organized conference like @afc is proposing and free meetup like @f-f is suggesting (but from my perspective it should be announced a bit earlier - I’m not able to join this Friday ;-)).
It seems that we can easily create a discourse poll here in this thread to measure interest in a conference (and ask how many people want to create a talk or just participate) and in a cyclical meetup.

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Love the idea, and I saw a couple of communities doing their meetups (not conferences) online.

Last week I saw the Haskell Amsterdam meetup and tomorrow I’ll attend one from the Berlin functional programming group https://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Functional-Programming-Group/events/270078170.

I can give a PS talk that I presented at the Buenos Aires Haskell group on february about using the 3-layered cake pattern

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I can’t make it this Friday either, but I’d love to join in the future.

I’m interested in attending either a conference or a meetup.