Lazycoder

How about a virtual developers conference?

Just saw this post over on Dave Winers site and it got me to thinking. I sent him an email.

Dave,
“What we needed then, and still do, is a conference run by developers for developers, where the choices of what’s on stage are made based on what’s new, and what presents real opportunities for working-together, this year, not five years ago.”

I think we already have that, every user group that ever launched was launched because a bunch of geeks wanted to talk with other geeks about how to get things done. I don’t think they are utilized enough primarily because I think blogs have taken over as the connecting medium rather than physical get-togethers.

Maybe rather than a physical developers conference, we just need to set up a “Virtual” conference. Maybe using IRC, maybe just by letting people volunteer to post articles at a given time and having them monitor the comments for say 30 minutes live. Just have a page that links to each of the presentations. I think we could have a much more diverse conference in that case. A greater number of tracks, even have some tracks that overlap languages occuring at the same time, but in different (programming)languages.

I kind of like the idea of a blogged conference more and more. Say we have a client application development track and we have 3 windows developers, 3 Java developers, and 3 Cocoa developers all post one article a piece, one right after the other for a half-hour; One every 30 minutes. After the author posts their article they agree to watch the comments on their article for 10-15 minutes. A Q&A period. Other developers can choose to participate in whatever track they want, but can still go back and view other tracks later. Maybe call it DevBlogCon.

If something like this were to happen, what kinds of tracks would you like to see? What kinds of topics are you interested in?

Podcast of some ideas for DevBlogCon created using iSpeakIt