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So, for the past year and change, I've served on the Board! of the Exclamation Foundation, the whimsically-named organization that runs !!Cons, and this year, I was elected, for some reason [1], as President of the Board!. Right at the beginning of my term, we had the unenviable task of trying to figure out how we were going to do !!Cons in 2021, while a pandemic still raged throughout the world. I wanted to explain the decisions we came to, and how we came to them — and I wanted to tell you why I'm still really excited for !!Con Online this year!
The short version of our decision is this (as you probably know by now): we're not going to do any in-person !!Cons this year, but we are going to do one !!Con-line basically around the same time as !!Con New York would otherwise be. (We won't do a !!Con West at all.) This wasn't a difficult decision, but it still sucked to make: !!Con has been a joyful, exciting, and surprising retreat for many years, and it felt heartbreaking to have just one more thing "lost" to our screens. But, when it came down to it, we basically had three choices:
We could try for an in-person !!Con later in the year. In theory, there's a decent argument that, if everything goes perfectly (vaccines are delivered on time, and no new variants come up), we might be able to safely have a modified !!Con in the late Fall that would allow some people to participate in a joyful weekend together.
We could have no !!Con at all. In theory, people might be burnt out from a year of staring at the screen, and we would just be adding another element of load to that; instead, we might be able to just punt for a year, and come back stronger in 2022.
We could have a single combined !!Con online! In theory, if we worked hard at it, we could build an event that is just as !!Con as we've ever done, and we might be able to expand our audience by experimenting with the format! Because the physical location of !!Con West is a defining characteristic of it, it doesn't make sense to have a separate event under the !!Con West banner; we would have only one !!Con.
We really wanted to go for the first option, but at the end of the day, we realized that we cannot have an in-person !!Con in 2021 without compromising on our core values. It is true that it might be possible to have a limited safe !!Con 2021: we could enforce vaccination and masking requirements, limit the attendance to a fraction of the capacity of a venue, and set thresholds for case rates in regions that attendees have recently visited. But doing these things would not allow us to have an equitable and representative !!Con.
In addition to determining who we would be able to include in such a !!Con, we needed also to consider who we would be excluding. Some answers to that question are obvious: immunocompromised attendees (or attendees that are otherwise medically at high risk, or attendees that could not be vaccinated) would simply not be able to attend in 2021. But, as with all questions of equity, there are nonobvious undercurrents beneath the surface. Attendees who care for people who are at high risk, including people who live with extended families and provide care for elder parents and grandparents, also may not be able to join without putting their families at risk -- and people who live with extended families are already disproportionately represented among conference-goers. Similarly, case rates are highest in regions of the country that are populated by people who are underrepresented in our community (including -- perhaps especially! -- in my own back yard). Finally, case rates are not only unevenly distributed in the US, but perhaps even more unevenly distributed in the world; vaccination access around the world will be even more inequal than that, and so travel to the US for non-residents will be even more difficult in late 2021.
Simply put, if we wanted !!Con to be populated by attendees that generally looked like me (disproportionately white, disproportionately wealthy, disproportionately young, and disproportionately healthy), we could have a !!Con in person in 2021. But that's not what !!Con is about. If we can't put equity foremost in a space we build, we don't want to build that space at all.
The question that we had to grapple with next was: can we make a !!Con Online that's worth having? There's an argument against: do people really want another online conference? Pandemic burnout has also had disproportionate impacts on would-be submitters and attendees: one organizer has noted that the time that she has spent on childcare has had a big impact on the amount of energy that she has had available for creative work. Any !!Con that we held would have to have to keep these things in mind.
Our decision, ultimately, was yes, we can have a great !!Con that mitigates some of these factors ... and here's why I'm excited about it! One of the first things that we noted was how well !!Con 2020 was received. Attendees said on Twitter that [!!Con] was a really bright spot of 2020, and that it felt like a glimpse of the good future today [that made them] hopeful for the future of conferences. One of the particularly warming things that we heard was that people enjoyed !!Con 2020 as something that was not just "good for a virtual conference", but as a good event in its own right: a new !!Con-goer described it as a conference that he'll be attending [...] every year from now on. Clearly, we would be doing the public a disservice if we did not find a way to showcase computing that is joyful, exciting, and surprising for another year -- if we let !!Con fall as yet another victim of the pandemic.
Another thing that we realized that we could make changes to !!Con in ways that mitigate some of our equitability concerns. For instance, although some people who have caregiving obligations may be unable to submit, we can make the conference more accessible to other caregivers by changing the format: classically, !!Con has required a weekend-long commitment (something that attendees have previously noted is difficult to manage with young children!), but by changing !!Con to be split up in "bite-size chunks" over the course of a week, we can bring in attendees and speakers for whom !!Con would not have been previously accessible at all!
Similarly, by announcing that !!Con is an online event from the very start, we can solicit talk proposals from people all over the world -- including people for whom travel to New York would have been prohibitive. We were lucky to have Taeyoon Choi give us a tour of Seoul as part of his keynote; could we make geographic representation a primary goal of !!Con 2021 by taking explicit steps to welcome in speakers (and attendees) who are not only based out of New York City? We plan to try to meet our audience by scheduling sessions that are accessible to folks in different parts of the world, and who have differing constraints around when they'd be able to participate.
An online !!Con provides a (hopefully) once-in-a-good-long-while opportunity to experiment with our format in ways that we wouldn't be able to when we return to doing !!Cons in person. We think that we can do it equitably, and just as important, we think that we can have one with great speakers, great attendees, and that will still be a lot of fun!
So here's our plan. !!Con 2021, if you didn't already know, will be an entirely online event, running from May 15th through 22nd. We'll have two fantastic keynote speakers -- Angie Jones, and Kate Temkin -- to bookend our conference on the opening and closing Sundays. We'll return to our Discord space to let attendees relish in the excitement of !!Con together during talks (it was a big hit last year!), and we're working on new ways to have "in-person-like" unconferencing time together (more on that soon!). Our session talks will be about one hour per day, at varying times during the day, and just like last year, we'll have a mix of live and prerecorded talks; we'll also organize "watch parties", so that attendees who can't join at the original live times will have groups of people to watch with.
We're really excited about !!Con this year! Last year's "felt like home" to me: chatting on Discord during talks (and, for speakers giving prerecorded talks, getting to chat with the speakers during the talks!) brought me the same sense of wonder that talking with !!Con attendees in person did, and the unconferencing spaces that we built felt like they fostered the same kind of spontaneous discussion that I remember loving at our in-person events. I get the sense that this year's !!Con will be at least as special. On behalf of the Exclamation Foundation Board!, and the !!Con 2021 organizing team, we hope you'll join us!
The !!Con 2021 Call for Talk Proposals is open through Thursday, April 8th. We'd love to hear about your idea for a 10-minute lightning talk about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. You don't have to be an experienced speaker (actually, some of my favorite talks were by speakers whose first public talk was at a !!Con!), but you do have to get a proposal in by the deadline! I'm hoping to see you there.
Thanks to Lindsey Kuper, Sarah Withee, and Julia Evans for reading drafts of this post.
[1] Imposter syndrome does not manifest for me regularly in my technical work, but it often does when it comes to organizational work. It's still hard for me to differentiate Accelerated Tech, Inc. — my real employer — from Emarhavil Heavy Industries — the joke company name that some friends and I used ten years ago as undergrads. Being President of the Board of Exclamation Foundation, while being eminently real, feels a little like cosplay of being on the board of a non-profit: the name is even whimsical humor! But all the same, Exclamation Foundation is very real and actually does work that I consider to be important, and although I often can't quite differentiate it from a dream when I do my year-end donations to Real Actual Non-Profits With Big Organizational Structures like the ACLU, I am humbled by the trust that my fellow board-members have placed in me to give me a turn to steer the ship for a year.