Registering for events

Since the pandemic started and all conferences moved online, the GNOME ones are the only one I’ve seen that require people to register in order to access talks. Privacy conscious friends have told me they would not attend the events because of that, and I can’t think of a good reason to actually require registration. Unlike for physical events, counting attendees is easy, as BBB (used for streaming talks live) and Youtube (used for publishing talks after the fact) give you the number of participants or viewers. In fact, given we publish talks afterwards, friends have argued that incentivises them even more not to participate during the event and they’d rather just wait for the talks to be made available.

GNOME often stated that it cares about privacy, so it should show it and aim at collecting as little data as necessary.

So, can we please stop requiring registration?

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GUADEC and GNOME ASIA will be both live streamed on youtube.
All the talks will be accessible right away for everyone who would not like to register.

I am afraid this won’t be possible.
Some purposes of the registrations are:

  • To give us (the org team) a better understanding who our audience is?
  • What people would like to receive from our events?
  • What people would like to see more from GNOME? This way we try to integrate more on that in our schedule
  • Who is willing to host their own social event or an online beer event to make GUADEC/GNOME ASIA or any other event more interactive and fun.
  • Who would like to volunteer and help us with the moderation of the talks, coordinating speakers, testing the platform.

These are all questions in the registration form.

Its not only about numbers on how many people attended , its also about the social aspect of the conference.

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Perhaps the same questions could be offered on a voluntary basis instead of being a requirement?

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All those information are valuable. Still, they are not representative of everyone who followed the event but only of people who:

  • knew about the registration
  • wanted to use BBB instead of YouTube
  • accepted to fill the form

This makes quite a biased set. This also doesn’t come at no cost: it actively incentivizes people to use YouTube instead of BBB, preventing them from interacting with the presenter.

@steko’s suggestion to make it opt-in sounds like good option, since people who just wanted to attend are going to fill the fields with garbage anyway.

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