Today we witnessed the first day of a "new", let's say, another type of conference. At least for me this one was new. As I was told there were events like this before but I missed them. Today was the first day of the ICON.US conference, one of those under the flag of the "old" ICON conferences held over the past decades. As ICON.UK is a "live" conference for some years (at least to my conscience) this was the first "virtual" one I have ever attended. A packed day with awesome sessions (> 8 hours) only via GotoWebinar.
Besides the technical aspects there was a whole bunch of valuable content on the first day (there's another day tomorrow). Notice: attendance was free to all who registered early - and of course I was one of the early-birds. During the day Chris Miller, the main organizer of this event, said several times that there were still registrations between the sessions - awesome!
Due to timezones I started to attend at 3 pm CEST - letting the OGS and following session passing by as a podcast (I was just listening to them) as I still had to do some work. I watched the broadcast from 5:45pm CEST until the end of the day. It was a blast!
Once again, the community - which is mainly a part of the organisation team AND the speakers - showed WHY they are doing all of this: because they can and have the passion to do it - and they love to share their knowledge.
Of course it wasn't just like any other event where you meet the people in person but thanks the direct channel in the webinar during question time and Skype/Slack channels it felt almost "being" there and "talking" to them. The beer was missing though 
I am really looking forward to tomorrow's sessions. A big thank goes out to Chris Miller, the whole team, the sponsors and the top notch speakers who brought and will bring this to "us" around the planet! You're all doing a great job! 