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Virtual FoxFest - A New Way to Conference

If you haven't been keeping up with the news around the Fox community, the Southwest Fox conference has gone digital now showing up as Virtual FoxFest.  At $49, it's a steal and a great way to learn some new ideas and get inspired.

While the reasoning for this change is fairly obvious with the year of COVID - for me, this is something that has been a long time coming. I appreciate many people's needs for a physical conference but the world is very large and it's difficult to get people from around the world into a single physical location.

I recently attended a single-track conference via YouTube (a Quasar conference). YouTube's Live stream provided a very handy way to watch, rewind and communicate with people online. While Tamar, Doug and Rick are still making decisions related to the streaming platform, there are lots of great options available. I'm really looking forward to it.

The FoxPro community has also really felt its international roots of late with VFP Advanced (from China), X # (a sponsor of the conference) and more. 

Maybe in the future, some form of hybrid conference can be held - maybe even with multiple locations around the world, all centering on one set of conferences. Microsoft used to do something like this with their Developer Days in the 90s - which I felt worked out quite well.  It also allows groups to create their own social events. This last paragraph sounds like a fully decentralized conference model but if done right, it might have some legs. After all, the development world is largely decentralized these days —- maybe it's time for conferences to do it as well.

It can be tricky to present online - especially if you've never done it before. So here's my offer to all speakers (for Virtual FoxFest). Contact me directly and you can do a run-through on your session via my Zoom Pro account. We’ll record the session so you can review it afterwards as well. While Zoom may not be the final or best platform for the conference, it can certainly help get you to hone your online skills. Drop me a line and we can schedule some time. 

I'm really looking forward to Virtual FoxFest and hope you are too.



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