Hi HN, I'm been thinking about this a lot these days while working on https://meetfromhome.io and well... I'd love to hear other people's opinions outside of my personal echo chamber.

w/ COVID forcing events to go online I've been intrigued on how their format may play out. I consider a conference primarily composed of content and networking.

content: who's going to sit watching 3x12 hours of video at home? I don't think that's effective. Before, our schedule would be put on pause and adapt to fit the conference's schedule, but when going online, the reverse would happen - we'd experience the conference on our own time. My gut tells me we'll start seeing more short online events (e.g. 1-2 hour "webinars"), or we'll see conferences get spread out over time as (pre-recorded?) videos.

networking: this one I'm mostly at a loss with. A lot of folks like https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/4/solving-online-events share the opinion that online events will get unbundled - in which case perhaps networking would be stand-alone. If that's the case, would we still have networking at an online conference? Or would it be more about community building that happens async?

I've been thinking about event networking as 1) being available, 2) there being the intent to network. Looking at networking sites like LinkedIn, people aren't really "available" and the intent to "network" isn't so much there - so interactions don't really happen - and when they do, they're seen as cold calling. But perhaps, these communities would be things like slack workspaces, discord servers, etc. - but personally I don't feel that scratches the itch. Other people have tried 1:1 matchmaking (e.g. hopin.to or runtheworld.today - it feels unnatural.

Anyways, curious to hear people's thoughts on this problem - if we unbundle online conferences / events - what would the format of content be? what would networking look like?