It’s very disappointing not to be able to be organizing a QS Conference. Obvoiusly getting people together from all over the world would be insane at this time; not to mention impossible and illegal in most normal venues.
SO… an online QS Conference? One or two days, timed for 8 am to 1 pm Pacific Time; 11 am to 4 pm Eastern Time; 5 pm to 10 pm Central European Time. 10-20 QS Show&Tell Talks plus 5-10 conference breakouts on topics like creating personal dashboards, understanding novel biometrics like RR and rhythmicity, making discoveries with simple active tracking; etc.
I’d participate for sure, but since no travel is required, what’s the point of squashing everything into a day or two? (vs keeping regular meetings going, some of which could focus on specific topics)
That’s a typically good @ejain question. The implicit reason (not very clearly articulated even to myself, I now realize) is that a QS Conference online that could concentrate attention and participation from a few hundred people over a day or two and produce some of the effects that our in person events do: more people seeing and giving talks close in time means more intense conversations/connections and impact. It also may have some production advantages: by concentrating a lot of value in one time we can get ourselves going for a burst of work to make it happen, document and publish the results, etc. And this goes along with my trying to figure out if the community would support it by paying something for registration. If a couple hundred people say yes and are willing to register, it makes a lot of things easier.