[tony]

I've done this during COVID. Zoom groups. I want to share my experience:

Participants in the zoom crowd are great folks.

Occasionally, these zoom events could get amped up on internet banter - this could disappoint the original poster's goal of broadening their horizons.

The zooms aren't a random sampling of a professional or academic field. I'll leave it at that.

Also, if we're there, we're also part of that statistic: we needed the internet to socialize - which is OK - but that puts us with other people who were also frustrated in real life and needed to go online to connect with others.

These sessions had highly talented presenters from around the world. Despite that, they often weren't places where everyone gets work gets done - which may surprise people used to Gitlab/GitHub/etc and doing open source. If you want to chat, OK - if you like to accomplish things, nothing happens. This really was what struck me the most.

[cblockdude]

> Participants in the zoom crowd are great folks.

This dude is right. I did zooms. Many zooms. I had nothing else to do, no work, nothing. So I did zoom. Then many zooms. I am great folk. Such a great folk.