!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) 2020 is two days of ten-minute talks (with lots of breaks, of course!) to celebrate the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing.

This is our 7th year and our first time running it virtually. Happy to answer any questions about the conference. We’ll also be publishing our notes about how we ran a virtual conference afterward.

Hope you enjoy!

Is the Discord channel invite-only? The speakers mention it a lot but I didn't see a link anywhere.

Yes, sorry! We sold tickets to that earlier this year.

If you're interested in attending future !!Cons, sign up for our mailing list (on our website) and we'll let you know when tickets go on sale.

You're sold out of virtual tickets?

yes, we limited the number of people in the discord so we could make sure that we could keep up with moderation and tshirts and stuff. But the livestream was available online for free :)

The coolest thing about !!Con (other than the amazing talks) is the blinded talk submission process. Talks are purely evaluated on content, not speaker nor the speaker's attributes in any way.

Thanks! If I may link my own blog, we have a writeup of our selection process here: https://organicdonut.com/2018/03/the-con-talk-anonymization-...

Thanks for that link. I have not had an opportunity to read the detail on this (only that it _was_ anonymized). I hope this becomes a model for all conferences.

> Talks are purely evaluated on content, not speaker nor the speaker's attributes in any way.

Personally, I think one problem with evaluating talks purely on written proposals is that the process misses out on whether a submitter is able to attract the audience's attention, and to convey their points within the allocated time.

Written proposals can be heavily edited; talks on stage (especially if there isn't a rehearsal beforehand — most conferences wouldn't have the resources to do this) can't.

So what would work better? Video proposals of an excerpt of the talk in front of a webcam? If you make sure the jury isn't biased why not (they could also be biased with written proposals of course)

Ah, I forgot to add: evaluating talks purely on anonymous talk proposals.

I admire conferences that rigorously aim for blind selection to give all speaker candidates a fair chance, but I feel that the audience occasionally gets the short end of the stick with a bad presenter.

> So what would work better?

I think a two-pass approach could work better.

The first anonymised pass is for rating and commenting on the written talk proposals.

A second pass, with candidate names revealed, would help fine-tune the lineup and make sure that it's the best it can be. It could also include watching the candidate's talks at other conferences, to see if they're good at communicating their ideas.

Will there be recordings of the lifestream somewhere to dl later?

Yes! :)

They're on the Confreaks youtube channel, and we'll release individual talk videos a few weeks from now.

Interesting content, NNs trained for poetry was interesting, would love to see it for rap music and near rhymes

Thanks! We've had Allison Parrish on a few times, here's her talk from last year on spelling words using NNs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bykvo3Ww_1k

Yeah her work is awesome, even her github repo's work plug & play out of the box!