< head> conference; the power and weakness of an online conference

What is so great abut <head>? Is it the name? Is it the speakers? Is it the amazing sessions they gave us? No, it’s the place. An online conference is so different from an offline one.

You know, the most ironic part of it is, there was almost no distance between speakers and attendees.
Have you ever been to a conference (small or big, doesn’t even matter) where the speaker is talking and you get all these crazy ideas in your <head>. Well I have. But what can you do? You could raise your hand and speak up in front of everybody; you can tell it to your neighbor or you can talk about it after the session.

At <head> conference, you are able to give your feedback at the moment in the chat. The other attendees respond to that and most of the speakers do to. This leads to funny situations, interesting points of view, and a great feeling of the community spirit. I attended the session “Ooooh, that’s clever! (unnatural experiments in web design)” by Paul Annett and everything started linking to related stuff. At another session someone didn’t understand something and got immediately response from a fellow attendee.

But it’s not all business. There was time for fun and socializing as well. For some reason, in between sessions, we talked about Belgium, so I asked the people from Belgium to raise their hand (you can literarily do that in Adobe Share) and so I learned that there were at least 6 Belgians in that room. And other people told us where they were from too.

The other great thing about that chatting was that your name is on the screen whenever you say something. So you know who you’re talking to. What brings us to googling names and getting linkedin connections in my mailbox. I also googled a couple of attendees names what made me find this one crazy website one of them made (can’t remember the url though).

So all is great, but still… at some point I did missed really talking face to face, see their faces, hear them laughing,..

So to sum up:

PRO

You’re at home, or anywhere else;
you can eat a sandwich whenever you want;
you can google stuff;
the interaction with other participants and with the speakers is great;
I haven’t mentioned it but the Q&A part after the presentation was great every time;
it was a lot of fun
… .

CON

You cannot shake hands, see faces (except for speakers),… ;
there were some little technical problems, I had problems on friday but on saturday the only problems were the speakers not knowing Adobe Share well enough :-).

I just knew it had to be great, and it really was. My heart is bleeding when I say that I could only attend saturday (and a little bit of friday). I will watch the presentations afterwards but it won’t be the same. I will not be able to interact with everyone..

Aral, you and the team did a great job job there, but I’ll still be glad to see you at a offline conference again. Big thanks to the organizer, the speakers and the attendees.

(I wrote this really fast, before leaving for Amsterdam, so I hope I didn’t wrote stupid stuff or made horrible mistakes )