Why we keep it in person

Running events in person is more work than running them online by a wide margin. Somebody has to find a venue, count chairs, sort out coffee, and be there early. It would be easier to do all of it over a video call. We keep doing it the hard way for a few reasons.

Online, nobody interrupts

That sounds like a feature. It is not. The moment a conversation gets interesting is usually the moment somebody cuts in with an objection, and that is exactly the thing a video call flattens. In a room, the follow-up question happens naturally, and the third and fourth ones after it.

The useful part is unplanned

Almost nobody remembers a specific slide from a talk they saw six months ago. They remember the person they ended up talking to afterwards. That part cannot really be scheduled, only made likely: put interested people in the same place, give them a reason to start talking, and then get out of the way.

It is harder to be a spectator

Reading about the field is passive. You can do it for a year and end up knowing a lot of vocabulary and very few people. Turning up somewhere puts you in front of others who are working on the same things, which tends to turn a vague interest into something more concrete faster than any amount of reading.

None of this requires the events to be expensive or polished, which is why they are free and run by volunteers. It mostly requires that they keep happening, and that anyone who wants to come can.