To quote some things I've said in Discord conversations about this since the original post:
for me: there is no substitute for the experience of seeing and conversing with friends and values-aligned strangers in person. All the technological things we can do to whack-a-mole particular subsets of that experience (textual chat, videocalls large and small, livestreams, better audio, birds-of-a-feather meetups, etc.) are pale shadows as [another person] said. I'm sure we'll talk about this in the post-mortem.
And:
In case anyone thinks I am saying: NO! I VETO! or something like that: I do not have the power to veto anything (I'm not on the concom) and I believe I hear what people are saying about things that worked well for them this year. But! I am trying to reduce any accidental impression of consensus, since if no one says "hmmmm" then in this text medium it can be easy to accidentally seem like we're all agreed on this. Also! Let's note survivorship bias (the only people talking here about this issue are people who decided to come to WisCONline, AND got ok enough with saying things in Discord to talk).
some followup throughts on the Discord stuff
for me: there is no substitute for the experience of seeing and conversing with friends and values-aligned strangers in person. All the technological things we can do to whack-a-mole particular subsets of that experience (textual chat, videocalls large and small, livestreams, better audio, birds-of-a-feather meetups, etc.) are pale shadows as [another person] said. I'm sure we'll talk about this in the post-mortem.
And:
In case anyone thinks I am saying: NO! I VETO! or something like that: I do not have the power to veto anything (I'm not on the concom) and I believe I hear what people are saying about things that worked well for them this year. But! I am trying to reduce any accidental impression of consensus, since if no one says "hmmmm" then in this text medium it can be easy to accidentally seem like we're all agreed on this. Also! Let's note survivorship bias (the only people talking here about this issue are people who decided to come to WisCONline, AND got ok enough with saying things in Discord to talk).