Hamvention 2020 is cancelled.
Or is it?
The year is 2020. Just about everybody owns a computer, a smartphone, and a broadband internet connection. A massive pandemic has shut down all social gatherings for the foreseeable future. All concerts, church congregations, marathons, festivals, St. Patricks Day, and ham radio conventions, shuttered.
What are we hams going to do?!
Hamvention Online
As much as I really do believe COVID-19 has presented radio amateurs with a glowing opportunity to do more stuff with ham radio (like learn CW, build some antennas, make more QSOs, monitor 146.52, etc), I do not think we have to suffer in total convention isolation now that most people have the ability to participate in an online symposium.
I ask the organizers of Hamvention, vendors, forum speakers, and all of it’s prospective attendees to work together to bring Hamvention online.
I know this idea won’t bring back the flea market, camaraderie, or the cheesecake on a stick, but I do think this is the best opportunity to bring the ham radio convention to the world wide web.
How to Run Hamvention Online
Hamvention Organizers
- Set up a new website to capture visitors and relay them to their desired destinations.
- Propose to forum hosts to bring their talk online via YouTube or Twitch. I suggest these two in lieu of Skype, WebEx, or Zoom because they’re free, and can support many tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, and can be interacted in real-time using chat.
- Certain forums, primarily Q&A forums, might want to use Zoom over YT or Twitch, but this will require Hamvention to have a paid Business-level Zoom account so many hundreds of people are able to attend.
- Brainstorm a method to attract interest and Q&A from hams who don’t/can’t/refuse to use YouTube/Twitch/etc.
- Create and publish a schedule for presenter streams and premieres to go live.
- Create a swap meet webpage to capture prospective flea-marketers
- Communication and coordination with presenters and vendors
Forum Presenters
- Purchase a decent webcam and microphone if you don’t already have one, or pre-record your talk on YouTube and use it’s “Premiere” feature to post it live at your scheduled time.
- Have a volunteer monitor the chat to collect questions so the presenter doesn’t have to field them at the same time as his or her presentation.
Vendors
- Create coupon codes and discounts for virtual attendees
- Schedule gear announcements and coordinate with organizers
- Create an all-day drop-in skype/zoom, or other chat system for attendees to come in to ask questions.
Convention Attendees
- Get accounts on Youtube, Twitch, and/or Zoom, or whatever other medium being used by the online convention.
- Submit questions prior and during the premier or stream of the presenter.
- Create a schedule of presentations of which you want to view and interact live.
Just because we’re need to distance ourselves to flatten the load curve to our healthcare system doesn’t mean we can’t get our fix of listening and interacting with the movers and shakers in ham radio, which is one of Hamvention’s greatest contributions to the radio service. I think we can make it happen in just two months.
We can also bring this to the amateur radio airwaves. Those who cannot/will not attend a stream on the internet might be able to tune in to their local repeater for a simulcast of the stream, hosted by, say, the local radio club. Or perhaps tune into it via HF, hosted by any number of MASSIVE contest-grade stations that exist across the world. There’s a great opportunity here to make the best of a bad situation.
I was planning on writing a bit more of a proposal but since the news dropped sooner than I expected, I thought I ought to finish this sooner to ride the wave.
My next proposal – Online VE Testing – is coming soon.
You make sense! Local hamfests might even have simple presentations over a local repeater.
In just the past few days, I’ve gotten to participate in SEVERAL conferences that wouldn’t have made sense to travel to, because they moved to an online format. One of them was actually the 2020 HamSCI workshop!
And I’ve been able to do it while working from home, with the conference stream on my second screen, looking up when something particularly interesting happens. I still got my work done, just worked a bit late to make up for the half-hour or so that I was really distracted and engaged in the conference talks instead of my actual work.
Hamvention done this way would be amazing. I rarely make it to many talks anyway, because the popular ones are crowded, the obscure ones are in weird little huts off in the corner of the grounds, and half the time the one I really cared about got rescheduled and I made the mistake of relying on the paper program instead of the app which would’ve shown me the update.
Bonus: No porta-potties.
We must make this happen.