Many miss conferences; but with codvid its going to be a while before we get back to something similar to what we once knew as "normal" so lets talk virtual conferences...something I've now done a few of both as speaker and as attendee....

First off - I think doing a single talk on a focused subject for an hour or so is just fine in virtual form. Conferences as in "multiple talks in possibly multiple tracks all day for possibly multiple days" ...those just don't work in virtual form - at least not directly mapped.

It is just so much harder for both attendees and speakers to get engaged/interested for longer than maybe 30-50 minutes "online" - the speaker can't "read the room" and the listeners are just sitting in their homes or offices just feeling "meeh" - especially after a few of these.

What does work - at least for me; are the unconference style sessions. Anywhere I've been where everyone are able to participate and contribute everything was just Better. Last week I attended @SoCraTes_Conf and it was great!...

you meet in the "morning", everyone joined on zoom, we used a miro board which had been divided into 5 tracks with 5 time slots. Goal was to find ~25 topics which anyone (except the leads of the talks) could go in and out off.

It worked remarkably well ...

I brought one topic "how can we make java better ?" - I introduced my attempt with jbang but then we had a conversation on other related things - it was both as expected but also with unexpected new insights. It was just great...

..i managed to visit a bunch of the others and most I visited was similar - someone had a topic, presented on it and the "crowd" then made it something more/something different.

If you are doing any kind of virtual conference I beg/suggest for you to explore if you bring in this kind of unconference style to your events - I think it will much more interesting and memorable than traditional conference events which you could just watch anytime on youtube!