Another possibility for timing is about April next year. By that time the novelty will have worn off for all the newbies who have turned up over the past 6 months. We’d have heaps of time to gather feedback from them on pain points, and reach out to fedi devs, old and new. The momentum built up at the event could feed into dev efforts for the year, instead of dribbling away during the holiday season.
It’s not exactly striking while the iron is hot though. Thoughts?
I have posted a poll in the 'verse asking whether folks would be more likely to attend an event later this year, or early next year. It will be open for a week. Please boost so we can get more feedback on this. It also helps to gauge the general level of enthusiasm in the community for having an event.
This kinda event is needed so that we can get a wide spread of voices to build consensuses on what is the Fediverse and how it is “native” to the #openweb
This is both a technical and a social movement - one thing is obvious we do have a culture to share, what this culture is comes from meany places.
Understanding the overlaps would be helpful, #FOSS development (#4opens) is likely a good first step on this path.
Then we have meany subcultures that are a part of the space, it’s a mine feald to hard categorize these, so broad overlaps is a good outcome - then wide diversity in a good second step.
Then working code is king, this needs a better aproch than we currently have, think almost everyone agrees, but we have not found a clear path.
A yearly event is needed.
Well the poll ended. We only got 59 votes, so we’ve got our work cut out for us if we want to get broad participation. There was support for both options but the majority leans towards having an event later this year.
Let’s set a date!
We need at least 3 months for organising and outreach. I’m definitely keen to have it done and dusted before the end of October. So attendees have time to action some of the ideas and inspiration that comes out of the event, before the end-of-year crunch kicks in. So that means sometime in Sept/ Oct, and more organising time never hurts, so I’m leaning towards October.
Are there any other big events planned for October we’d want to avoid a date clash with?
As much as I support people voting, October is a busy conference month. https://confs.tech/ has a list of events. Some larger ones that might overlap with this community: EuroRust Oct 12–13, Web Directions Oct 26–27. There seems to be a less busy gap in week 44 (Oct 30–31, Nov 1–4) so maybe that is a good option.
Welcome to SocialHub!
Just to clarify, the vote was for later this year, over doing it next year. October was my suggestion, for the reasons given.
Thanks so much for the info. If we can sneak in at the end of Oct/ start of Nov, there might be opportunities to do outreach at some of these Oct events, esp. Web Directions.
Guix Europe is interested in doing a physical event later in October/November.
Its speculative but I can help coordinate should there be a Fediverse event physically and you want to pool an approach.
Their 10th Anniversary was in Paris last year:
https://10years.guix.gnu.org/
They do x2-3 days prior to Fosdem each year
If this is going to happen, we’re going to need at least 2 other people who are willing to coordinate this with me. Any volunteers?
Let’s all toot to give attention to this topic and ask for volunteers. Here’s my toot.
I can help out, if we can keep it simple #KISS then it’s a doable mission and is needed 
We have cats
Ill try and chip in with comms where I can
(perhaps a pooled account would be smart)
I can try to do more around August/September but I dont want to overcommit.
As I mentioned pre conference interviews of tech stacks could be fun and productive.
Please consider IETF dates & I hope this conf will not clash with it: 4-10 November in Prague IETF | IETF 118 Prague
Other events in October, in addition to those already mentioned: Upcoming Events — RIPE Network Coordination Centre
I’m curious about the event & would participate but can’t be committed to help organizing.
It looks like we’re off to a good start here. Lots of planning and decisions to be made yet, but the interest in bringing this to fruition is really encouraging.
Things start slow, like a newborn calf or elephant, stumbling around for a bit on wobbly legs and soon after able to walk and achieving a good stride.
Let’s keep this in mind and not get to ahead of ourselves or discouraged by a few slumps we’ll inevitably experience along the way as all of this unfolds like a 
flower…
This is going to be grand.
.
As a conference producer the methodology included this:
Doing this approach was an effective approach for getting attention and removing doubts.
This helped clarify the content and speakers in a conference, as well as marketing material
OK, so I want to lay out exactly why I want to share the coordination role for this proposed AP/ fediverse conference with a group of volunteers. This might help people clarify whether or not they might want to put their hand up for the job.
The actual logistics of organising an online conference are super simple, compared to putting on a 3 day workshop festival for community circus folks, including food for crew and punters (which I’ve done). Although any help with logistics will be gladly accepted, that’s not so much what we need volunteers for right now.
A conference for the federated social web needs to be (and to be seen to be) representative of that social web. It needs that to attract the broadest possible range of people as presenters and participants, so it can be really useful in helping people connect with each other, and find their role in the next phase of fediverse evolution. That’s going to be hard with a single person in charge of it - however benevolent their intentions might be. We need at least 3 committed people for this , but ideally I’d like a team of 5-7.
A team that coordinates such a conference needs to make a bunch of decisions that are inherently political. Decisions about CoC wording and enforcement, how the conference is structured, who gets to present, whether to have keynotes and who to give them, even what to call it and when to have it, etc. You can’t please all the people all the time, but with a diverse team of coordinators, we’ve got at least some hope of making good enough decisions about this stuff to convince good people it’s worth their time to participate.
So if you volunteer as a coordinator for this conference, you’re not committing to doing lots of nitty-gritty logistical work. We’ve already got people volunteering for specific tasks and we can shoulder-tap more (again, a more diverse team has access to more shoulders to tap).
You’re volunteering to put regular time into the work of communication, decision-making and - closer to the time and during the event - triaging and delegating unanticipated stuff as it comes up. I’m anticipating a short, fortnightly stand-up meeting, which is also a good way to kick the tires on the conferencing software we plan to use for the event. Also actively engaging with the other coordinators in a private chat room (IRC/ XMPP/ matrix or ideally a room accessible via all three), and participating in a private forum (a board here on SH, a Loomio group, or something like that) where can formalize and document decisions.
Plus clearing your schedule for a few days before, during, and ideally after event itself. Although there won’t be much to clean up with an online event, after any conference it’s good for the team to have a bit of time for debrief, social chat, and of course, rest.
So, are you able and willing to serve the fediverse community in a role like this? Can you think of anyone else who might? Link them to this post!
Portugal would very much like to welcome some of the events.
Awesome. I’m all for regional, in-person events related to AP and the Verse.
But what we’re discussing here is my attempt to bootstrap a purely online event, modeled on the APConf in 2020.
The #APconf event is lacking focus and energy from our “cats” so we will likely have a #fedifourm
I talked to these guys during the last event, they are new 'native" from the #twittermigration that bring the “normal” power politics with them.
An event that pushes liberal #NGO agendas is fine as a part of a balance. Though we have our old “native” libertarian cats, so the balance will be a challenge that we need to work on here.
Can we do some “cat herding” to work together on this path, like we seceded in comeing together a few years ago for the last #APconf’s and #EU outreach?
Good thoughts there. Count me in. When are you planning this? At this stage, a few dates and times would be helpful to pencil in.
Fantastic. Welcome aboard. Since @hamishcampbell has also volunteered, we now have a steering group of 3, which is enough to go ahead with an event. But I’d still like to add another 2-4 people. Any volunteers?
This is one of the decisions to be made by the steering group : ) One possibility, as mentioned above, is to do it late Oct/ early Nov. Although it’s been pointed out by a few people that this is a busy time for tech conferences. So I’m also open to pushing it out to early next year, maybe sometime in northern hemisphere spring.