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Debconf2020 took place when I was on personal vacations time. But anyway I’m lucky enough that my company, the Wikimedia Foundation, paid the conference registration fee for me and allowed me to take the time (after my vacations) to watch recordings from the conference.

This is my first time attending (or watching) a full-online conference, and I was curious to see first hand how it would develop. I was greatly surprised to see it worked pretty nicely, so kudos to the organization, video team, volunteers, etc!

What follows is my summary of the conference, from the different sessions and talks I watched (again, none of them live but recordings).

The first thing I saw was the Welcome to Debconf 2020 opening session. It is obvious the video was made with lots of love, I found it entertaining and useful. I love it :-)

Then I watched the BoF Can Free Software improve social equality. It was introduced and moderated by Hong Phuc Dang. Several participants, about 10 people, shared their visions on the interaction between open source projects and communities. I’m pretty much aware of the interesting social advancement that FLOSS can enable in communities, but sometimes is not so easy, it may also present challenges and barriers. The BoF was joined by many people from the Asia Pacific region, and for me, it has been very interesting to take a step back from the usual western vision of this topic. Anyway, about the session itself, I have the feeling the participants may have spent too much time on presentations, sharing their local stories (which are interesting, don’t get me wrong), perhaps leaving little room for actual proposal discussions or the like.

Next I watched the Bits from the DPL talk. In the session, Jonathan Carter goes over several topics affecting the project, both internally and externally. It was interesting to know more about the status of the project from a high level perspective, as an organization, including subjects such as money, common project problems, future issues we are anticipating, the social aspect of the project, etc.

The Lightning Talks session grabbed my attention. It is usually very funny to watch and not as dense as other talks. I’m glad I watched this as it includes some interesting talks, ranging from HAM radios (I love them!), to personal projects to help in certain tasks, and even some general reflections about life.

Just when I’m writing this very sentence, the video for the Come and meet your Debian Publicity team! talk has been uploaded. This team does an incredible work in keeping project information flowing, and social networks up-to-date and alive. Mind that the work of this team is mostly non-engineering, but still, is a vital part of the project. The folks in session explain what the team does, and they also discuss how new people can contribute, the different challenges related to language barriers, etc.

I have to admit I also started watching a couple other sessions that turned out to don’t be interesting to me (and therefore I didn’t finish the video). Also, I tried to watch a couple more sessions that didn’t publish their video recording just yet, for example the When We Virtualize the Whole Internet talk by Sam Hartman. Will check again in a couple of days.

It is a real pleasure the video recordings from the conference are made available online. One can join the conference anytime (like I’m doing!) and watch the sessions at any pace at any time. The video archive is big, I won’t be able to go over all of it. I won’t lie, I still have some pending videos to watch from last year Debconf2019 :-)