To change the subject a little bit, we may be on the verge of the end of the
large conference under any circumstance. If you took Jeff's, Vikram's, and
Mark's PowerPoint slides and imagine that they had added sound to them, so
that the authors gave their talks in a synchronized fashion, there would much
less reason for us all to get together.

The HP3000-L, although no one intended it, has pretty much killed the local
and regional users groups. Putting a conference of such sound synchronized
slides together once a year using a common technology could do the same for
large conferences.

The obvious advantages are that (i) everyone would get to participate (at
least as an audience member), anywhere in the world, at his own convenience,
(ii) the pains and costs of travel would be greatly minimized, and (iii)
certainly the costs of attendence could be decreased to nearly zero.

In this kind of arrangement, there would be no scheduling difficulties nor
odious choices about which talk in which track to attend. The talks would be
web resident and capable of being listened to at any time, as often as you
wished.

A selection committee could still pick and choose among the applicants as to
whose talks would be included in the "official" schedule. Tthe talks would be
prepared, reviewed, and edited before they were released in order to assure a
minimum quality, but that would be about all the committee would need to do,
other than obviously host the resulting talks on a server somewhere.

While we would further isolate ourselves from one another in this scenario --
and it is a real pleasure to eventually associate a face with a name -- the
process would have the offsetting advantages of being highly democratizing,
in that users anywhere in the world would all be put on an equal footing.

Wirt Atmar

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