gyptazy provided a recap of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium and it sounds great again. But his concerns about scaling are real and so, also I had often no chance to get a place for a talk. Wondering if it's still worth to get onsite next year or just to watch the recordings afterwards.
You can't attend all 30+ tracks at once anyway, you need to see recordings afterwards anyway if you are remotely interested in consuming the conference. I'd say the experience is just as much about meeting the people behind all the internet handles, getting into a full lecture room one talk in advance and listening in to something you otherwise wouldn't, join something bigger than email lists and matrix rooms, it's a unique wibe you can't find anywhere else.
I wonder if it naturally regulates itself in the way that people who get fed up by the queues don't come back the next year. You can definitely start by adding measures to limit the capacity or whatnot, but in both cases you exclude a certain part of the potential participants. I think I'd rather keep the wibe and ensure people can at least experience it once, than start gatekeeping.
It is been years since from my last time, however already about 10 years ago, it used to be either stick to a room, or stay close to a door and leave 10 minutes earlier, to try to get a spot in another talk, equally staying close to the door.
The number of times I heard this joke: Oh, nobody goes to FOSDEM anymore, it's way too crowded. But it's true. They have a serious overcrowding problem, with the queue outside longer than the number of seats, while the room is already packed.
The app had nice indicators of where the overcrowding was, though. It pushed me to less popular talks, where I discovered some hidden gems. I also came home with a big list of recordings to check out.
Scale has been an issue for years. The last time I went I just hung out in one DevRoom for a chunk of the conference. Running from room to room tends to be an exercise in frustration. There are a lot of people and the campus isn't that straightforward to navigate.
