Today was the last day of an online conference that I have been attending all this week. Since most participants were based in Indonesia, it was on Jakarta time: 2am-8am in my time zone. If you’ll excuse me, I think I need to sleep for a week.
@jemostrom Interesting. Hours staring at a Zoom window is fairly hellish of course, but this was a relatively small conference that I have attended in person for the past 4 years, and they are a lovely, friendly community. There was a lot of fun and affectionate teasing going on.
@jemostrom Watching talks was fine (I preferred to turn my video off then), giving a talk was weird as you can’t gauge audience reaction at all. Discussion was pretty difficult, though the chat messages gave an opportunity for shy people to ask questions.
@jemostrom The best bit was that more people from NGOs in Indonesia could attend than would have had the funding to attend in person.
@bsag yes, I see this as the big advantage and it also applies to me, I might go to one conference a year ... maybe ... this year I'll attend at least 3. The one I attended was 200+ during the sessions so the direct connection with others wasn't that great. My impressions
@jemostrom interesting - I can see how it might be difficult with so many attendees. The organisers of this conference asked presenters to submit their presentation with narration before the conf in case of problems with connections and to enable attendees to view in advance if they wanted. There’s no solution to the time zone problem though!