Questions after talks at DebConf (idea)

To: debconf-discuss@lists.debian.org

Subject: Questions after talks at DebConf (idea)

From: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>

Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2018 11:11:39 +0100

Message-id: <[🔎] 1536401499.2139218.1501074824.4ACF984C@webmail.messagingengine.com>

Hi, I noticed yesterday [0] that the PyCascades conference [1] explicitly does not permit any questions and answers after a presentation. Finding this intriguing, I followed up to ask for more information and was given the following reply: No live Q&A after talks makes it a more friendly environment for first time and new speakers. @ericholscher has written about this and explained it better than I can in a tweet :) [link removed] -- https://twitter.com/mariatta/status/1038110484673622016 ~ Here is the salient section from the linked page by Eric Holscher: There are two primary audiences that have issues with questions: - Speakers - The audience Let's start with speakers. Many first-time speakers that I know have an intense anxiety around having the audience ask questions. They think, "I am going to go up and give a talk, and then someone in the audience will contradict or embarrass me for lack of knowledge afterward." Audience questions after talks are one of the biggest sources of stress for speakers. Now for the audience. They have chosen to attend a talk to hear from a specific speaker about a topic they are knowledgeable on. If there are 250 people in the room, each minute of the talk is over 4 hours of combined time. When you offer up a microphone to anyone in the audience, you are now offering 4 hours of peoples life to an unaudited question and answer that likely only provides value to a small minority of attendees. This is not a good use of anyones time, and often audiences feel trapped in a talk room during Q&A time. -- http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/nov/12/questions-at-conferences/ ~ Anyway, whilst I am in no way suggesting DebConf takes an identical approach (!!), I would be curious to know whether if we are missing any new contributions this way. This is naturally a difficult question to answer on this list as anyone subscribed is likely a DebConf regular and thus somewhat less likely to be a first-timer. Such an idea could potentially be accomodated in a similar fashion to the "Record talk? [Y]/n" question for a talk proposal; an "Allow Q&A? [Y]/n", also defaulting to "yes". Just to underline, I'm not suggesting DebConf changes anything, just sharing an somewhat-random and hopefully thought-provoking idea I came across. [0] https://twitter.com/mariatta/status/1037907132954292224 [1] https://2019.pycascades.com/ Regards, -- ,''`. : :' : Chris Lamb `. `'` lamby@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk `-