I wish this had covered things before the conference proper. In particular, I’m in the planning stages of an event and we’re trying to find a good OSS tool for managing our call for speakers. OpenCFP would work, but seems to be in maintenance mode only, and I’m having trouble finding alternatives. (We’ve used OpenCFP before and it works well enough, so I have a fallback, but it’s always nice to be aware of options.)

Posted Apr 15, 2023 22:08 UTC (Sat) by ppisa (subscriber, #67307) [Link]

DebConf (the Debian Project annual conference) has provided live videos and catered for remote participation at least partially since 2005, and fully (this is, live-streaming from all official venues -- modulo some changes here and there) since 2007. We have always had participation from the audience using IRC; it might not seem so much compared with a full videoconferencing solution, but that is what our community has asked (and kept happy with).
We didn't welcome remote participation as a presenter before, mainly because nobody thought about it... but we have had remote talks at least since 2016.
Of course, 2020 happened. Shortly before the pandemic, Jonathan Carter (now the DPL; I think he was not yet elected) announced the Debian Social project -- a set of social-oriented systems based 100% on free software, meant to work together with Debian. It included Peertube and Jitsi instances, plus many more services people on the fediverse will be more likely to identify than myself.
DebConf has used many conference management systems through its life -- When I became involved in the organization, we used Comas (a system based in mod_perl I wrote) for two years (2005 and 2006). We switched to Pentabarf, written in Ruby (not exactly Rails), and stayed with it until 2014. In 2014 we used Canonical's Summit. Since 2015, wehave been using CTLUG's Wafer.