 Hi everyone! Here in Massapra, Florencia and Hugo all from different places and we just wanted to talk a little bit about the conference and give you a break from the challenges we've been trying to solve. First it's nice to see the community alive and hopefully next year we're all together and vibrating and Marche Bonsocol, but for now let's enjoy our screen and flow the energy through it. So Flo and Hugo, can you tell us about your experience at building such a good conference online? How is it? I mean it's been, it was really fun, I think it was a really fun event. It's definitely very different from organizing a conference in person where a lot of the experience of organizing involves physically running back and forth, like literally running from one end of a venue to another over and over again. At this time it's a lot of emailing and a lot of being very nervous about streams. I think we were able to create something a little bit unique and have some really interesting conversations so I'm really happy about that. I think it's weirdly far more nerve-wracking to do a conference online because you don't see necessarily what's going wrong. When you're doing a conference physically, you know if the person is physically there, you see them, you know where they are, you tell them they're in the wrong room and they should go to the other room, whereas online there's a lot of just hoping that you've sent the right email, that you've chatted with the right person, that you haven't accidentally sent an email to GitHub notifications instead of an actual human, which is the thing that happened. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of your first time really being deeply involved in the conference so I'm curious about your very, I guess, different experience or the fact that your experience is specifically with the online conference as opposed to the physical one on the organized side. I can't hear you. I can't hear you either. You can't? No? Uh-oh. See, this is what I mean. All right, we'll just improvise. This is what we do. I was wondering, what was the best thing about the fact that it was online? Because we often talk about how difficult it is online and how we all have Zoom fatigue, but if you had like two things to say that was the best because it was online or benefits of it, what would it be? I think it was, I mean, definitely less physical exhaustion. Ooh, this looks fun. I think we're in a weird split screen. I love it. Very creative. So I think, well, on just the logistic side, it is a lot less physically exhausting of an experience. But the main, I think, really, really big thing is that we're able to get speakers from all over the place. We do, for the in-person conference, we do fly speakers in, but we're limited in our budget, right? You know, if we have a lot of really good speakers that apply, who live in Australia, India, United Arab Emirates, that's really, really expensive and we are definitely budget constrained. So sometimes we have to make some hard choices on budget. Whereas here, it's, you know, anyone can connect, anyone can give a talk. And so we were able to have a lot of really great speakers that were coming in from outside of Montreal and outside of North America. And that was just not, not at all a concern or a constraint, except when it came to actually building the schedule. And then that was really, that was really funny because, you know, we had someone, we had Pedro, for example, who was somewhere in Asia, he was like, I think 11 hours ahead. And then we had, you know, we had people in Europe, we had people on the West Coast, we had, it was just, the putting together the schedule was a bit of a challenge for sure. I was thinking we're here to go. Hello, hello. Yeah, so I just heard what Florencia just said and I really agree. I think time zones were definitely a challenge, something that we're like, okay, so everything is going to go, going to go smoothly. And then people were replying emails like, well, this is too late for me. Can you swap the schedule for this? And with the blocks, that meant like not only swapping their talks, but swapping the whole block. And I think Florencia did a really good job of really making it all happen, because some people really wanted to be at a certain time and stuff like that. And some people, like Florencia said, really compromised. Pedro is one good example. I think Reina also was a really good example. She was moderating at Q&A and I think it was just midnight for her. And she looked like it was like right in the afternoon, she was really, really great. So yeah, I think it worked well in the end. But yeah, some people had to make some really big efforts. We have kind of behind the scenes anecdotes that you haven't said to anyone or that it'd be funny to tell. I want to talk about the rabbit. Yeah, I think we have a few. I think Rendezvous is one of the running gag in the conference. I think we had a bit of problems with the platforms and speakers really had a tough time with the in-browser encoding in Rendezvous. And yeah, but I think that went great. We started to call them squirrel moments. So every time the stream crashed, we had a squirrel showing up. And yeah, so we were counting the number of squirrel appearances and stuff like that. I think we made a mistake in assuming that we would be able to transition from one speaker to the other very quickly, because essentially we had only five minute breaks and as a result, if we ran behind, everything ran behind. But I think actually one thing that was funny was one of the kind of bets that we made early on was that having these discussion would mean that we had some unique spontaneous content and we really wanted to stay away from having the content entirely prerecorded and if it was making things harder for ourselves. So and the other thing that we kind of bet on with the panels was that the speakers would enjoy it and it was fun for them to participate. And I think that that was true. And sometimes we had, you know, we ended the panel, the speakers just continued talking to each other and we were a little bit like, okay, we need to continue. So that was funny. I mean, it's funny because it's good, but just creates a little bit of discomfort on the logistic side and results in funny rabbits being on the stream. And then just as a last question, I'd be wondering, what's your main wish for next year? Apart from being on site, probably. But that's too easy. What would you like want to have or see different? I'm curious what you think. I have some thoughts, but maybe you have really different ones and that would be very interesting. I think it's, I really like that we could bring people from all over the world to speak and relatively easily because it was online. I wish that this will continue so we'll be able to reach out to people that would be really a nice fit for Nordsek and bring them to Montreal. I think it'd be really nice to hear them live and stuff like that and not be limited by, for example, the people who can come. So yeah, I think really encouraging people from all over the world to participate in the CFP and having some really people that we know less about or are bigger in certain other countries that we speak less to would be really nice. Yeah, I completely agree. I also, so we had this dream in 2020 that we were going to do a community room and I really would like us to do that. We have the venue for it. It would be amazing to be able to provide a space where people can build stuff and maybe participate in small challenges and just be very hands-on in a structured form. I think that would be so cool and it gives us a lot of space to do things around the badge and people modding the badge and whatever. So I really want that to happen. I think yeah, it's really interesting to think, if we just rewind and we skip 2020-2021, which obviously changed things, that was sort of where we wanted to scale to because I think, I don't know, it doesn't go necessarily with the vibe of Nordsek to end up having like a gigantic amount of parallel talk tracks. So there's sort of thinking around what are the ways that we integrate the whole thing more and have the conference merge more seamlessly into the CTF and with the badge and with all these other things and the community room I think is hopefully it. And yeah, I guess maybe we will still stream next year. I don't know. It's something we've got to talk about, but I think it could be cool to have an in-person conference but also be streaming it now that we have that experience. We'll see. I think if we've gained some community members internationally, I guess it would be great to keep them and sometimes people can't necessarily travel. So it'd be good to have that be also an option for remote participation in a sense. Makes sense. Community room, international speakers, all together at Balsakor. Guys, we're going to let you go and hack again, but keep Nordsek in your heart. It's coming back in person soon, hopefully. And have a great weekend. Thank you so much. You too.