Thanks so much for this thoughtful followup. I've been really enjoying having a Discord in the background and it feels like it does add a valuable dimension for me, but I can definitely see why it's an added vulnerability, especially seeing all the conversations today about how to export content.
I think what felt most valuable to me as the parent of a small child was being able to still participate, have conversations, and be engaged during her naps and other necessary alone time. I know there is some childcare at wiscon but at 1.5 she's still in a clingy barnacle can't leave with strangers stage, so I'm not sure how much that would have helped if we'd been able to go in person this year.
It was also kind of nice to have a chat space to ask questions and find out what's going on before heading to something, and seeing visible names/pronouns was really nice. I'm a little mixed about the chats for panels, to be honest -- the conversations were valuable but i had a lot of trouble getting distracted by the conversation, especially with short panels.
I love slack but i agree about the 10k lock on messages falling short of true ephemerality. I guess if you only had it live for a month you could use people's registration fees to cover month's subscription and give people more privileges to block people -- in free slack that's been a problem at ingress events, because they assume you'd have no reason to block someone at your company, and the limited roles are a paid feature. I wonder if the fancier version might also have settings to limit data retention, but the blocking thing might be a deal breaker.
I love thinking about it in terms of connection before content. I'm used to using chats like this to prep for an event then largely ignoring them once everyone gets to the location except for the occasional logistics check. (Again coming from the weird context of ingress, which is also hierarchical and competitive in maybe problematic ways.)
It does seem like trying to scale the discord up to a live con at the ratio of one channel per panel would be utterly unmanageable, but maybe there would be some value in keeping a discord similarly sized to this year's or deliberately scaled down in the future? As i noted in my survey (which i filled out before seeing this) I'm sufficiently invested in the idea of a chat that I'd be willing to help out if there's a way i could be useful within the constraints of my childcare obligations and living on the east coast.
I really really love the idea of having wiscon spinoff events throughout the year!
The Otherwise auction was super fun! I'm somehow always pleasantly surprised by that, don't know why my brain expects so little from auctions! Thank you for everything you did to make that and the whole convention happen! It is definitely one of the highlights of my 2020 so far.
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I think what felt most valuable to me as the parent of a small child was being able to still participate, have conversations, and be engaged during her naps and other necessary alone time. I know there is some childcare at wiscon but at 1.5 she's still in a clingy barnacle can't leave with strangers stage, so I'm not sure how much that would have helped if we'd been able to go in person this year.
It was also kind of nice to have a chat space to ask questions and find out what's going on before heading to something, and seeing visible names/pronouns was really nice. I'm a little mixed about the chats for panels, to be honest -- the conversations were valuable but i had a lot of trouble getting distracted by the conversation, especially with short panels.
I love slack but i agree about the 10k lock on messages falling short of true ephemerality. I guess if you only had it live for a month you could use people's registration fees to cover month's subscription and give people more privileges to block people -- in free slack that's been a problem at ingress events, because they assume you'd have no reason to block someone at your company, and the limited roles are a paid feature. I wonder if the fancier version might also have settings to limit data retention, but the blocking thing might be a deal breaker.
I love thinking about it in terms of connection before content. I'm used to using chats like this to prep for an event then largely ignoring them once everyone gets to the location except for the occasional logistics check. (Again coming from the weird context of ingress, which is also hierarchical and competitive in maybe problematic ways.)
It does seem like trying to scale the discord up to a live con at the ratio of one channel per panel would be utterly unmanageable, but maybe there would be some value in keeping a discord similarly sized to this year's or deliberately scaled down in the future? As i noted in my survey (which i filled out before seeing this) I'm sufficiently invested in the idea of a chat that I'd be willing to help out if there's a way i could be useful within the constraints of my childcare obligations and living on the east coast.
I really really love the idea of having wiscon spinoff events throughout the year!
The Otherwise auction was super fun! I'm somehow always pleasantly surprised by that, don't know why my brain expects so little from auctions! Thank you for everything you did to make that and the whole convention happen! It is definitely one of the highlights of my 2020 so far.