I've recently spoken at two conferences that were converted from on-site to virtual, and my conclusion is that it's not worth it. Certainly as a speaker, it's pretty unpleasant talking for an hour into my webcam without any audience feedback.
But the bigger issue is that conferences are (for me, and I gather for a lot of people) mostly about the "hallway track," not the official talks. I get a lot more value for talking to people at lunch and after talks than I do from the presentations themselves. That's currently totally missing from the online conference platforms I've used, rendering the whole thing kind of pointless. I might as well just record my talk and put it on youtube; the conference itself it adding little value aside from curation.
I don't think there will be any onsite conferences for the next year, which is a shame. Hopefully they will return at some point.
This is not just an issue of virtual conferences but also online college classes. Explaining itself over a Zoom conference is sadly not the same experience you would get face to face.
Having been to 18 conferences in the last 6 years I cannot imagine how online conferences are worth it. Meaning worth it for both viewers and speakers.
This isn’t to diminish efforts to put on these events. However, it’s important to look at the motives behind conferences:
1.) boost your status as speaker - speaking at conferences can land you a new job, get you investment, etc.
2.) gaining insight that you otherwise couldn’t gain online as an attendee - hallway gatherings, random discussions, etc is why a lot of people go to conferences. The chance that you might catch that one expert in your field and pick their brain is high.
3.) acquire leads as an attending company - for conferences like re:Invent or Ignite you’re year is made by acquiring thousands of leads over the course of 4 days. I’ve seen companies spend $250k on a booth and close over $5m in sales just from one conference.
4.) build good will with the community as a sponsor - when people see you throwing money around sponsoring social events and after parties they tend to give you more attention. Companies do this ultimately to close more business.
Given those 4 motives, I don’t see how online conferences are a thing. Perhaps my definition of conference is too enterprise-y and narrow though.
In research point 2 is key. I’ve been a presenter at an international conference that was done online due to the crisis, and it has nothing to do on the level of interactions in comparison to an on-site event. For established scientists conferences can rightfully seen as work-vacation and expensive social gathering, but for a newcomer it’s incredibly useful to be able to put a face on name’s, have a chat with a famous researcher and establish links informally.
Having been both a conference speaker and attendee at times most of the value in conferences is the networking opportunities... which are close to non-existent with remote conferences. I think they're pretty pointless otherwise.
I think this still has value. Sure, the networking part of it is over. But you still have tens of thousands of people watching this. For a framework like Rails it's usually a nice yearly milestone to talk about the future of the framework, to shed light on some new ill understood features (e.g webpack) etc etc. Railsconf are always watched by more people at home than they are by people attending anyway, that's nothing new.
Since most commenters consider them pointless, I'd like to add another perspective: Personally, I won't travel half around the world (or just my own country) to attend a conference I prefer to follow on my own schedule and from the comfort of my home and therefore consider those streams very valuable.
That said, most conferences had this option before it became a necessity. So having the conference in real life while making it available for everyone remotely is obviously the best of both worlds, but declaring the latter remote-only conference worthless seems like an exaggeration to me and certainly doesn't refelct my point of view.
On a sidenote: You might enjoy Confreaks, which covers a whole range of those conferences: https://confreaks.tv/
Conferences are about networking not learning. We can learn as much, sooner and more comfortably from our desk by reading blog posts or watching videos. Networking is more powerful if you're a speaker, that's why I'm not going to any event anymore unless I speak there.
I guess that for speakers an online conference is as good as posting to the personal blog or uploading a new video. Furthermore it keeps the link with the conference community alive. So it's OK. For the public, no difference than going through the links in any weekly or monthly digest about that technology. For sponsors, which are an important part of the revenues of the conference organizers, I don't know.
What are people’s thoughts on remote conferences moving forward?