NixCon 2020 status update

I helped organized (international) tech conferences for well over ten years and there are always things that can be improved. As an organizer you become oversensitive to these things (I have been there many times) and things can get blown out of proportion. Personally I thought that NixCon 2019 was very well run.

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I vote zoom. Presentation mode works super well, and allows for moderator control of who can speak, manage Q&A, etc. there’s been several thesis defenses and academic conferences on zoom and it’s worked great. Plus it seems to have the highest quality video of any of the services I’ve used, and many in the community probably already have a corporate account so could be hosted at 0 cost.

No one seems to be saying it so maybe I’m missing something, but spending surplus on privately used instance is highly questionable at first blush. Maybe people at Nix foundation / Nix community were consulted first. Were those 1k people connected concurrently associated with Nix? If not it sounds like a misuse of funds.

I’m not familiar with Nix Foundation / how NixCon is organized or financed, but seems like money should remain in the nonprofits bank account & that a nonprofit should bear financial risk of a conference.

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I neither took part in organizing NixCon 2019 nor did i attend. I only acted as facilitator for NixCon 2018 in London and have some experience in organizing conferences.

From this “outside perspective” (if you will):

it doesn’t come as a shock to me that there is going to be friction when 5000 € are being spent without (as it seems) transparent, public discussion.

I can think of a lot of ways to invest money for either an upcoming NixCon or the Nix community in general. Purchasing hardware and considering how to make this useful to either NixCon or the community in general as an /afterthought/ can only be described as unfortunate. Note that i am not saying my ideas would have been the right use of the money. More like it is far from obvious what the best use might be so this should have been evaluated i guess.

So if people are disgruntled about that, i think that cannot be dismissed.

I guess the way forward is to be explicit about how to deal with surplus in the future so situations like this can be avoided.

EDIT none of this should in any way belittle the energy, time, passion and effort spent by all the organizer of NixCon 2019. I was happy to be able to watch from afar and i appreciate that.

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I’m not sure, but I do belive it is visible, from what I’m writing and all of these points were already made, but I’ll summarize them once more:

  1. It isn’t a standard situation that the margin calculacted to cover the potential loss, is at all sent to the community, as I announced originally we would do - as far as I can tell, the ‘surplus’ from previous Nixcon is still at the balance of original organizer. I’m not saying this is either good or bad, if anything, it is more evidence that the process to organize NixCons is broken;

  2. If you compare the value we’ve got for the money in London to Brno… I don’t know, I thought that was pretty obvious and I didn’t have to point that out - but also due to all the things we decided to do extra (like the party on premises), we needed to leave much bigger headroom in the budget for mistakes and problems (broken stuff, etc.).

  3. COVID-19 was an unexpected hit for all of us and sitting on this ‘surplus’ from Nixcon, we decided to do even more community work (not everything is only about Nix, you know?) - and enable at least some schools at least some function through online meet platform at a time, where none of the big guys stepped up to do so. Keeping them reliant on a thing with links to the Chinese? Pfff.

  4. Like I’ve said the first time, I am offering to do even more community work for the Nix community (hosting dev environments for developers isn’t anything and of any use to anyone?) and I have tried apologizing for not consulting anyone before using a part of the leftover Nixcon Brno surplus to cover our need for HW for Meet.

  5. Also, I’ve said that we do intend to re-pay that back, where I tried to put it in a way that would be understood, that I see that as - I don’t know - maybe a potential loss to the community, when we could cooperate further and make something more of it?

I’m not expecting standing ovations or anything remotely closely to it, I was just expecting more understanding approach from the community.

If that’s not possible, just send me the IBAN and let’s be done with it.

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Should anyone find interest in that, the timeline with Meet went something like this:

03/16 a total lockdown instituted in CZ (ping me on irc if you want further comments on that :smiley:)
03/17 we’ve launched meet.vpsfree.cz and announced it, it was running on a machine with 20 cores at the time, which we thought, OMG that should be enough, … or?
03/18 well, it’s not going to be nearly enough
03/19 still replying to teacher’s e-mails, that we would do everything we could to help them teach
03/20 panicking, seeing that we can’t cover that by any means on our own, well shit, we’re a non-profit and can’t easily access any kind of short-term financing, but we’re a community, so we’re trying to borrow HW everywhere we can
03/25 panicking even more, finding out guys at local universities would love to help, but only have environments with VMs that can’t handle as much UDP traffic as we need…
03/28 we’re at max of racking any HW we could get (+72 cores, at a time where everyone else was too looking for some extra horsepower, not that bad)
03/30 well shit, even that’s not going to be enough
03/31 we panic-ordered +40 cores of additional HW, just barely configured to get us as many cores as we can get

Then it was a fight still until Skype announced that they too, would do videoconferencing without registration and via a web browser, so with no setup overhead. And then everyone else, then the orders to use Teams kicked in in companies, so that lowered the use even more.

Now some of the users are returning as the various other platforms keep having problems, but it’s not nearly as hot as is was a few weeks ago.

I thought I might regret taking this path, but I hoped it won’t come to it - I chose to believe in the better in people.

^^ community powa! The guy who was nice enough to lend us that HW even racked it at a time, when we weren’t able to get to the DC :wink: The pizzabox on the side doesn’t have a cover, it’s an older engineering sample of dual node OpenCompute system - that’s how desperate we were - so it’s turned on a side (we couldn’t put the paper boxes on and didn’t find a shelf in time…)

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Zoom can be used in a browser.

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My experiences with using zoom on nixos quite a lot for university lectures this last weeks:

In theory the web interface runs on chromium and works, but it is rather unstable. It seems that if there is package loss, the audio stream gets instantly dropped, and i had to reload the site, sometimes every five minutes. (I cant do much about my connection here right now) Other participants reported the same behavior. Zoom also does a lot to push the client, hiding the webinterface behind countdowns. (University also mentioned that the webinterface is not supposed to be used)

So for me there was no alternative to install this random unfree binary from nixpkgs, that works well and handles bad connections. But i still have bad feelings about it, see for example this article from last year: https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-maybe-an-rce-just-get-them-to-visit-your-website-ac75c83f4ef5

If there is an offer for hosting of free alternatives, i would definitely take it, even if it should cost a bit more.

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I think we should split the different threads happening here.

My attempt:

  • NixCon 2019 surplus

    • vpsAdminOS virtual servers offer
  • Which video streaming software to use

  • General rules of engagement for future NixCons (e.g. where should the surplus go)

  • Opinions on NixCon 2019

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Regarding the NixCon surplus, there has been some miscommunication happening internally in the NixCon orga team. Sorry about the confusion that this caused. We had a meeting today and the matter has been resolved :slight_smile:

Going forward we will be opening a new foundation to act as a fiscal host, something we wanted to do anyways. All the money will be restored to the NixCon project.

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For what its worth, it definitely sounds to me like your heart is in the right place. I’m not in a position to have any opinion about the money though, since I didn’t attend the conference and none of it comes from me.

I think the general problem is that there is not really any single person that could have decided this. Its a big, decentrally “governed” community, people are almost guaranteed to have different opinions. Coming to a consensus takes a long time, and is even harder (maybe impossible) post-hoc.

So don’t take the communities reaction or lack thereof personally. Its just not something we were really equipped to deal with.

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I created a new thread to discuss how NixCon 2020 Online edition should look like because it’s not quite clear to me yet and I need your help for that.

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I feel like all of you are ignoring the clearly obvious choice here, which is to have NixCon 2020 in Animal Crossing.

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I’d like to join, is it available in nixpkgs?

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I’ve seen some events organized in Mozilla Hubs, but it’s still not mature enough to recommend it for an event like NixCon yet :slight_smile:

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Looks like Animal Crossing conferences is a real thing: https://desertedislanddevops.com/

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See, now we could have a case study. It looked successful.

Yes, i have seen that mentioned too.

They run 568 BBB-Servers behind Scalelite for schools in one federal state of germany.

Just FYI.

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I wonder if there’s still a cache of a “physical” conference. I don’t know the situation in Germany but I guess the restrictions that were in place in April may have been relaxed by now. My country (Italy) apparently now allows conferences and meetings with only bland distancing measures.
The real problem are still the travel restrictions.

I have been a big fan of NixOS for many years and also recently joined meet.coop https://forum.meet.coop/ , an online video conference (BBB) cooperative in preparation.

When I tried to install BBB on my home server, I naturally came to NixOS, looking for the package. But I think the package is still in WIP status.

This thread is has a lot of useful information - thank you so much!!

Hi,

It is June 23, 2020 so maybe things have changed. Their load balancer seems to be open source:

Or is there a proprietary version in addition to this?