It starts Friday evening, Central time. You can view the full FtBConscience schedule online right now — please note that all times listed are on US Central Time. This is a purely historical artifact, because I put the first draft of the schedule together, and I included a big messy table of time zones that gave the hours of events in Perth and Moscow and points in between, and everyone puked over the complexity. I think they all just said “screw it, we’ll use Myers’ time zone”.
All the sessions are organized in one hour blocks of time; most are a single hour, a few are two hour discussions. The way this is going to work is that speakers should only assume they have 45 minutes to talk, and leave 15 minutes of slack for questions.
We’re going to be strict about the times, I hope. I’m moderating lots of sessions, set up in alternating hours, so if I don’t crack the whip and close out discussions promptly on the mark, I’ll get lost and confused. The FtB facilitators who are moderating the sessions will be under orders to be disciplinarians.
We also have a chat room set up for random conversations. We moderators will be watching that, but if it gets hectic questions might fly by. I’ll be watching the youtube channel for my sessions, so that’s another place you can leave questions/comments.
As always, go to FtBCon.org for the latest information. Miri is in charge of that, I think she might have a stroke when it comes time to deal with the flood of updates that will be necessary as the con is in progress. Be patient, this is our first time.
Central time looks to be GMT-5 at the moment.
Oyyy. I was hoping to recruit some minions to help with the website, but I was so busy doing the website that I forgot. :(
That link is almost the same of which the conference website says that the conference itself will be there:
“Some of you have been wondering how you’ll get to interact with other con attendees and submit questions to speakers. We’ll be using the Pharyngula chat room, located here. Anyone can use the chatroom; you don’t have to make an account first.”
The difference is that you had the URL begin with widget00.mibbit.com and the website has it with wbe001.mibbit.com.
So, I’m completely confused: Where, on which website, will the conference be? Where do I need to be to participate in the question sessions?
David, mibbit.com is a browser-based IRC client, so since both the IRC server and channel are the same in the two links, they’ll take you to the same place. You could choose to use a different IRC client to connect to irc.cynirc.net and join channel #pharyngula and it should have the same effect.
…except that I typoed. irc.synirc.net, as in the link. Sorry!
Suggestions for free downloadable IRC clients, if you prefer: Colloquy (Mac), mIRC or Y-Chat (Windows), Irssi (Linux/Mac/Windows, but note that it’s a command-line client).
Connect to irc.synirc.org (or .net) and #pharyngula, as Squiddhartha said.
Colloquy is also available for iOS, for $1.99
Thanks.