Dear Hraban, Am 03.08.22 um 10:50 schrieb Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context:
Taco convinced me not to cancel the meeting due to a lack of participants, but I’d like to know why you (esp. if you attended previous meetings) decided not to come:
short answer. The meeting is in the holidays of my wife and she expects me to join her in a travel. ;-) The long answer. During the pandemic I stopped planning more than one month ahead. So the above mentioned travel isn't booked yet. For this reason I miss the early birds and maybe the booking of special things like a private room. (In fact I don't found information about accommodations on the website) Before Corona I wanted to attend a meeting but didn't do it for two reasons. 1. I wasn't sure if I can follow the programe. Though I am not a bloody beginner, I am still at the basis of the learning curve. Many talks seems to be way above my understanding. (The same is true for the monthly video meetings.) But I am very interested in learning – I can even imagine that my cooperative would pay for it. 2. I always like to combine meetings with my passion to dance Tango. If a meeting is in a bigger city, chances are high that I could spend a couple of evenings in a local milonga. From Dreifelden to any milonga in NRW or Hessen I would need at least an hour by car. In this year there are some things that might affect others as well. Currently the first real life meetings starts again and I have to confess that it is not so easy to switch mentally to the pre-corona area. My cooperative will be present at the Bits&Bäume conference in Berlin and we are struggling to organize this. This sounds silly but all the processes of planning such an event must be restarted. Corona isn't over and even boostered people have to lay down for at least one week and to stay away from work another one to recover from covid. So for that reason I am still very cautious – and I expect to take over more tasks at work when colleagues got ill from one day to another. So it is not a good time too stay away for one week to attend a meeting. On the other hand I would really like to get into ConTeXt as I am convinced that it is the thing I need for my personal work and my work in my cooperative. So I would still like to attend a meeting. What are the things I am interested in most? I would like to take an intensive training. Aside from the core functions I would like to learn more about integrations as this is what we are trying to do at Hostsharing at the moment. This could cover small things like automated business graphics with different tools to printing from TEI-XML to setup a single source publishing chain with Pandoc. The problems are in the details. ;-) Another topic: If we want to promote ConTeXt it would be nice to have small meetings on bigger meetings like FOSDEM in Belgium or FrOSCon in Germany. (I was so bold to propose a workshop at FrOSCon and alas it was accepted!) At FrOSCon and FOSDEM you can get a developer room to make your own programe. That would be a good place for introductory workshops. I hope that this is of some value for you. Thank you very much for organizing the meeting in these challenging times. juh