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Socialising is very important (hell, why are you talking on HN if you don't want social interaction)? The teams that have lunch together perform better.

http://ridiculouslyefficient.com/boost-employee-productivity...

I think the precious little time at Debconf is good for socialising. It seems ok if that's the main purpose. There is already plenty technical discussion in Debian mailing lists.

1. Strawman. I never said that socializing was unimportant. But socializing is not the only way to actually collaborate. You don’t have to be best buddies with your collegues to work with them. “Having lunch together” does not imply being friends with people, but it could certainly imply having a set time to talk more informally about more general problems without a set “owner”.

2. I was at Debconf for two weeks. I hardly consider that to be “precious little time”.

But you emphatically said that you do not go to conferences to socialise. That's the most important part of a conference. I daresay, it's really the ultimate goal. Otherwise, we could just all post screencasts online instead of having a conference. That would be a lot cheaper.

Emphatically not wanting to socialise sounds exactly like you think socialising is not important. A less emphatic "no" might still make it sound like you think it has some importance.

And two weeks a year is precious little time, if you compare it with having lunch with your coworkers every day.

You, (like many people, including the organizers of many conferences) keep conflating socializing with collaboration. I tried to make the difference clear in my original comment, and it was also the point of the linked article. Being friends with someone isn’t the only way to collaborate with them. It is simply a way to do it, and if you want to collaborate that way, then socializing is certainly important to keep that friendship alive. But if I want to collaborate as a professional colleague instead of as a friend, then no, I don’t think I should be expected to socialize with great masses of people in order to simply collaborate with some of them.

Neither of jordigh's comments said anything about socializing being the same as collaboration; in fact, the first claimed that socialization improves collaboration, implying that the two are completely different things. You're being preemptively and repetitively belligerent here.

I hate the conference socializing, too.

Having lunch with your coworkers gives you 250 chances per year to have an important work-related conversation. A conference offers precious little time, so it is important to be efficient in getting people together who have things to say to each other.

Funny, where I'm working you'll get nasty looks when "talking shop" at lunch.

Important work conversations happen at work. Not on the break.

In that case, why spend your break with your work colleagues?

You may not believe it, but people can actually talk about other things than work. We all have private lives.

At Pycon, there's a lot of socializing and community building going on, and those are very important. But if you really care about meeting people with specific technical interests in order to advance on some project together, there are plenty of strategies to go about that.

1) Give a talk about the technical problem you are interested in. People who also care will attend, and later meet with you to discuss the topic (and related ones) in person. Giving a talk yourself is probably the best way to find people interested in your subject.

2) At Pycon you can book open spaces (e.g. https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/openspaces/). There are basically a bunch of small rooms, and you can book some time slots to assign the room a certain topic, and see whether like-minded people will show up. (You could also do something non-technical like board games...)

3) After Pycon proper, there are usually a couple of days of code sprints (e.g. https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/sprints/). This gives people the chance to advance an open source project together. Some people use that as a way to meet in person with other developers, or it's possible to recruit new developers for a project.

Yes, things like those “open spaces” are exactly what I like to see! Very nice. I also remember the tables they had at a CCCC I once was at, with lots of people from a project sitting and working at tables, with large signs on each table so you could simply walk up to a table and talk to the people there about their project.

Also: The “big names” in the community, the more famous people, do not have this problem. For them, the “unplanned social chaos” model of conference organization works perfectly – lots of people are constantly coming to them to talk about the topics that they are interested in – they don’t see the problem, they live in a kind of bubble. But in reality, this is a symptom of the problem – people seek out the big names because they are the only persons that people know of who are intestested in the topic. There is no mechanism to make people aware of each other’s interest.

At the risk of sounding provocative, Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second. They're much more of a target platform than a leader in their own right.

As such, I'm not surprised that there was significantly more interest in self-preservation and socializing than in any technical work. I don't recall Debian ever pushing boundaries.

Debian has plenty of technical work done within its boundaries. (Don’t forget the pioneering work that Debian did with its package format which was greatly superior to that of Red Hat’s RPM at the time.) A distribution is not created by simply downloading all software from the upstream authors, compiling them and burning a CD. Simply read the Debian Policy manual to get a feel for the vastness of an undertaking which creating a distribution really is:

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

Of course they've done technical work, they're a distribution. Of course they have a distribution standard, they're a large committee-driven project. None of these are pushing the boundaries as such.

I never said anything to the contrary, but rather that those are all secondary to the primary political goals. A distribution having a detailed technical policy does not refute any of this.

I don't support Red Hat, either. dpkg's original conception was a tarball-based package management Perl script with rudimentary substring match dependency processing. It evolved as time went on.

GNU is the same. Politics first, technology second. They've generally been much better at both, however.

Any time you put more than two people in a room together and ask them to finish something, there will be politics. The only thing you can do is make sure everyone has some goals that are the same as the organization's. In a corporation, this is achieved by paying people to be responsible for certain aspects of the company's operations. In a volunteer organization, this is accomplished by having the people in the organization socialize around the organization.

Everyone has their reasons. Some people are motivated by producing beautiful functional code. Others are motivated by the ideals of Free Software. Still others want to use the community to sell hardware. At the end of the day, as long as they're all moving in a similar direction, the movement is successful.

Whether or not the movement is a good thing depends on your values and motives.

> Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second.

And that may well be what is wrong with the Linux ecosystem today. I keep seeing formerly technical "projects" go social over and over and over, with the inevitable result that it turns political and gets derailed from its technical efforts.

This in large part because going social attracts people that end up using the name and reputation of the project to ride political hobby horses (potentially for social ladder climbing outside the project).

You're doing conferences wrong, then. The entire point of conferences is the interpersonal networking. Online materials are far better way to disseminate information, the speaking sessions are literally a waste of time, just an excuse to get people in the same hotel together.

I can certainly do networking, but there’s a difference with that and pure socializing. When you network, you want to know that the people you’re about to talk to have some reasonable chance of being interested in your topics. In pure socializing, it doesn’t matter, you just mash as many different people together as possible and it’s all good.

When I network, I want to know that this group, here, at this time or in this room or at this table, is actually interested in a specific topic which I wish to discuss. I can’t do that with a conference of hundreds of people most of which are not interested in the topics I want to discuss.

A conference should not be simply an opportunity to socialize. If that’s how you do conferences, then you’re doing them wrong.

Debian is your common topic. The people who are there are interested in a topic you're interested in. From what it sounds like, you want to precognate that down to one or two people.

Networking is about meeting people you can get along with who maybe, one day, some day, if things work nicely, might have a mutual benefit. You don't begin it with a pretense about what they can do for you now. That sort of opportunism is phony and can be smelled from a mile away. Networking works best when you just meet people to become friends with them, then hope to figure out ways you can help them, as friends do. My experience is that people pay it back in spades.

If it were just about merits, resumes would be a thing that actually worked and were important. Conferences are about networking and networking is about socialization.

Yeah, it could be years before the networking you do today pays off. That's just the way it is. You're dealing with people, not machines. It's like dating, you can't magic up a spell to make someone like you. People have their own agency, but they tend to congregate around and like to help out other people who are friendly and helpful without expecting anything in return, too.

You think its "phony" when someone shows up at X conference transparently focused of talking about X?

You think its selfish when some knows how we wants to help, and wants to find the people he wants to help?

I feel like I am taking crazy pills, where technical content gets zero attention in a technical project. It sounds to me like the conference are getting taken over by vacationers who want to have a party week (possibly soft-embezzled by expensing an employer) pushing out people who care about the project.

It reminds of when the college resume padders took over the high school math club, and instituted a substantial membership fee to finance a trip to a math competition where they didn't actually compete, and I had to create a new club to gather people for math activities.

I feel like you've already decided that these people who value soft skills are garbage ("soft-embezzled"--please!), but what the hell, I'll feed the troll.

Every technical project--and I think you'll find few people within Debian who'd claim it to be primarily one, it's a social movement with a technical component--is fundamentally an interpersonal enterprise, and face-to-face interaction is exactly that. Positive interactions are the underpinning, in functional communities, of the assumption of good faith and the ability to work with people who do not necessarily agree with you; it is the difference between "ugh, Bob is such a prick and he's wrong" and "I like Bob, we disagree, let's hash this out." You may (think that you do) not need this. Most people do. And most people recognize that they're better off working within a culture of positivity, rather than the bizarre flat "professionalism" you've described in this thread.

Everything, always, is about people. Assuming otherwise leads inevitably to disastrous ends. I think Debian, among others, has done well to harness that truth. We aren't a bunch of meat robots, no matter how hard you assert it.

> Debian is your common topic.

What is necessary is a topic to narrow the scope down to be few enough people for me to actually have time to talk to most of them. I can’t (and I feel I shouldn’t be made to) talk to hundreds of people merely to find them. Also, I could be of more help to people who need help in a field I know something about.

> Conferences are about networking and networking is about socialization.

Why do you assert this, when my point was that it is not so?

You can't know ahead of time who will be useful for you in the future.

It depends on the conference I guess. At some of them the talks are pretty good and something you want to attend.

If the programme really never mattered then the organisers wouldn't put as much trouble into it that they do.

It sounds like you've had a lot of bad experiences with conferences let you down by not focusing on the technical discussion. I'm really sorry you've had to go through that so often. In thinking about your predicament, it seems like there's an opportunity here for the organizers to put together an online forum before the conference so that people can put in for being put into groups and sessions where people have specific things that they want to talk about. It seems like both you and the other poster you were discussing this with were equally bothered by the other's preferred activities of conferences. I think if you could arrange discussions ahead of the conferences, you'd enjoy your time a lot more.

Sounds like a good idea. One other thing which organizers should watch out for is not to create enormous distractions away from discussions and networking:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...

(Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373983)

Seconded. I always find it hard at conferences to find people who are genuinely interested in stuff that I care about.