This year’s Stanford WebCamp (SWC) ran May 8 (online) and 9 (hybrid) and is still an outstanding Bay Area web conference that attracts local professionals is). As a member of the Bay Area web community with a particular interest in the use of web tools in higher education, this conference was a must-attend. It was a great opportunity to catch up on industry trends and have time for in-depth conversations with colleagues. If you didn't have the chance to attend, all of the presentations are posted on YouTube. 

As an organizer for Bay Area Drupal Camp(BADCamp), I'm very interested in how organizers’ decisions impact the quality of the conference and foster or hinder the conversation. In person conference attendance generally seems to be smaller post-COVID.. On SWC’s hybrid day I’m estimating about 50 people attended in person. All the presenters were on site, or IRL that day.

I found that the quality of my conference experience was greatly enhanced by attending in person. For those of us on site, we benefitted from the ability to interact with the presenter without delays or lags that can come with using technology. Also, we got to have related "off topic" conversations post presentation.Lastly, you just can’t underestimate the value of those impromptu hallway or picnic table conversations that were enriching and potentially invaluable, but can only take place when your colleagues are physically present.

Luke McCormick's presentation "Web Coding for Non-Coders -- using AI, of course"was a nice intro talk, but the limitations of a hybrid set up became clear. With three people in the room, and maybe 10 people remote, I have to believe the speaker missed the added dimension that a room full of 13 interested people attendess can contribute and feed. I personally know the value of that instant feedback that tells me I'm doing something of interested to others.it’s easy to start focusing onIn addition,  they hybrid set up  means we had to havethe typical orientation  for both for the speaker and the online attendees. Even with the good job of the technical support teamthere were bumps (hiccups?) in getting started and during the Q&A.

My favorite talk was by Jordan Koplowicz’s Creating an AI Chatbot in Drupal: The Easy Way,because it was a really helpful how to guide for setting up a chatbot. Jordan took us through all the steps and got to a demo-able Chatbot. Super cool! With at least 20 people in person IRL?, and a decent online crowd, the dynamic interaction with the crowd really enhanced the learning experience. Jordan responded to questions throughout the presentation, whichreally helped to deepen my understanding. And, even though Jordan repeated the questions from the in-person audience for the online folks,it felt like the online participants were a bit shortchanged? due to the "out of sight, out of mind"  effect of being remote for a hybrid talk.

Now onto the part that just can’t be done well at a hybrid event, if you’re remote:  the spontaneous discussions with colleagues that happen in the hallways, over coffee, at lunch, and at happy hour. I owe much of my early success building out an automated cloud-based web hosting to the conversations similiar to those I had at SWC, DrupalCon,  and BADCamp. that in-person advice included recommendations to build a campus template and use Drupal's "installation profile" feature to quickly spin up websites. Using that advice, I was able to build over 100 websites in the first month of starting up our service at UCSF! (Many thanks to Shawn DeArmond, Zach Chandler, and Brian Wood). I wouldn't have been able to succeed without the knowledge these folks provided. I can also think of conversations with Owen Lansbury and Sara Worrell-Berg that particularly helped me plan out the strategy for UCSF's web services. These conversations are the primary reason I go to a conference. The back and forth, the dialog, and hybrid cannot really capture that.

Maybe someday there will be a better system for hybrid conferences, but I'm sticking with in person events for the time being. Maybe this is just a long way of saying I'm looking forward to seeing more folks IRL, and consider visiting Oakland for BADCamp September 25-26! It's free and open to anyone interested in building out the open web.