0.0 Context Setting

New year, new season.

It’s a bright Monday, 2 January 2023 in Portland, Oregon, where the sunrise was off-the-charts.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 The Hallway Track

Over the break I had a chance to meet up with a few friends I haven’t seen in a long time. A sort of Act II of the ongoing COVID pandemic: the last time I’d seen one person in particular was at an actual honest to god conference nearly three years ago in Milan, just before waves hands.

So we got to talking about conferences and both mourned the inexorable shift away from hybrid events to in-person. One big point to get out of the way first: hybrid events are better for attendees when the alternative is nothing at all. This isn’t to say that hybrid events are good, or that the experience of hybrid events is good. Or even, honestly, that the experience of remote events is that great either. Just that the difference between being able to do something – anything – is still better than not being able to participate at all.

What was sad and a surprise was the amount of inertia that even a 1+ year pandemic could not overcome. After the initial exuberant wave of remote event platforms both new and old, they kind of… fizzled. People would rather meet each other, which is fine for the people who would rather meet each other. I would rather meet each other too, under controlled circumstances with skilled drivers on a closed circuit!

But “better hybrid events” is not the thing that caught my attention, at least not for this episode. I’ll just make a passing reference to “did anyone try to start a business to drop-ship home-studios-in-pelican-cases” for better video production? Or things like “without any research, I still have a feeling that most coworking spaces have not set up bookable recording/filming rooms”.

No, in this episode the inevitable thing that came up about wanting the conference experience back was “I really just want to go to hallway tracks again”, or “I just miss hanging out in the hotel bar with a group of people I don’t see often enough”.

This hallway track keeps coming up again and again. It’s not to say that the sessions and keynotes aren’t interesting and relevant and useful, it’s that as much of the conference experience – for some people – is the unscheduled time.

Clearly you can’t exactly recreate the hallway track experience. But what are things that get close to it?

One thing I’ve noticed is – and I acknowledge I’m very likely weird an an outlier here – is the stupid number of Slacks I’m technically in. If I take a look at the application right now, I’m currently logged into eight Slacks, only one of which is for work. Every Slack I’m in contains a number of overlapping people, and if I were to think about it, then these social Slacks are definitely a bit Hallway-ish.

Some Slacks are definitely more Hallway-track than others. The Slack for the XOXO Festival has stuck around for multiple years and is genuinely, at this point, the online community for XOXO Festival attendees and as far as I can tell continues to have the critical mass to create new relationships and introductions between people.

This starts to feel dangerously like reintroducing circles as a concept in social software, which I’m particularly wary of (people have tried!). But what might make a good Hallway Slack?

• Enough people: you need a big pool. Lots of opportunities for second-third-degree relationships between people.
• Mixing: take lots of different circles and smush them together. Sure, conferences are around a particular topic, but there are still enough different interest groups within that topic. Otherwise they’d be too small!
• Topics: a bunch of hallway tracks emerge when a session finishes and people spill out and are trying to figure out what to go to next. If you were being weird about it (certainly one way to experiment), then you could chuck everyone out of the Slack channels they’re in and then force them back into General for a bit.
• Time-bound: look, nobody wants Yet Another Slack to be in. What about time-bound channels? Get invited to something and know it’s going to disappear in 2 weeks.
• Threads, perhaps: Or again, a time-bound channel. Threads could be seen as that group of people over there in that corner who got together and you can @ people to get them to come over too. But one thing about replicating a real-world experience is that you can’t really be in two places or two groups at the same time. Just one conversation, just one place. Unless, I guess, you’re texting or whatever.
• Exchanges: every so often I have the idea of trying to figure out the common people amongst different Slacks and get reminded that this is a horribly bad idea for privacy reasons amongst others. Now, Slack does let you create shared channels with another organization, but this isn’t quite the same thing. In fact, I should probably drop the whole Slack thing and think about how this might work in IRC.

Anyway. Getting from the Hallway Track to the Hallway Slack. That’s a thing that caught my attention.

1.2 Three Smaller Things That Caught My Attention

• Dan Hill riffing on railways, not sandwiches, in a nicely hopeful essay about the Great Renovation.
• Greg Egan, the theoretical physicist’s hard science fiction author, has a new novel out, Scale, which is a detective story set in a world where people exist at different scales.
• The virtual machine of videogame Another World, but implemented on an FPGA.

It’s 2023!

Best,

Dan