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