Hi Nextcloud team and community,
unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the conference 
, but I’d like to make a suggestion that I believe may be useful for you and all the participants of the conference (and those that - like me - unfortunately won’t be able to attend).
Essentially the idea is to create a subcategory for your upcoming conference where each of the presentations/abstracts is presented as a new discussion topic. This would have several benefits for participants, presenters and conference organizers.
Before, as well as during the conference
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Participants could engage in discussions with the presenters that would help them clarify questions that would help them to choose the sessions that are of most interest to them, but also what they can do to prepare for the session.
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Presenters may also benefit from the exchange, by getting some initial feedback on their presentation. This would help them to adapt it in a way that better suits the interests of the participants as well as the needs of the presenters and prepare them for eventual questions.
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Conference organizers can use the discussions to collect common questions and topics that emerge. These can then be used to feed into panel discussions and to prepare that are based on the interests of the participants.
After the conference
summarizing lessons learned and following up on the conference are crucial for building a network and instigating further questions and activities. The proposed idea could help to keep the conversation going beyond the conference, providing several benefits.
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Participants would have an easy way to follow up on the sessions they attended and ask further questions that arose after. Another benefit lies in the possibility to ask questions about a session participants weren’t able to attend. All these questions and discussions are then also available to other participants, which avoids siloed information exchange and facilitates knowledge sharing instead.
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Presenters can get further feedback on their presentations or reading recommendations that participants would like to share with them.
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Conference organizers can use the discussions to identify topics of interest for future conferences and also summarize and share some of these insights with participants and presenters.
This could also help you increase the number of people in your forum.
Questions
I would love to discuss the idea a little bit further and know what the thoughts of the different groups are
- How can the idea be further improved?
- Where do you see challenges with implementing this?
- Are there other ways to achieve similar things?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this.