Virtual, Physical or… Both?

JDay USA 2025 was a remarkable combination of a physical and virtual event. It brought Joomlers together, both in person and online.

The Rise of Virtual Meetings: A Pandemic Silver Lining

COVID-19 forced conferences and community events to adapt. The possibilities for virtual meetings increased. It began as a necessity, but also had advantages:

✅ Easier global participation: no travel costs and time or visa restrictions.
✅ Lower environmental impact: fewer flights and less waste.
✅ Easier to record events: people can watch back at a convenient time.

Virtual JoomlaDays and Joomla User Groups (JUGs), like many others, embraced platforms like Zoom, Jitsi, Google Meet, and live-streamed YouTube sessions. 

At that time I was mainly involved in a community for domain specific languages that is spread all over the world. We had weekly meetings with presentations and it really brought that group more together and stimulated collaboration. I was very enthusiastic about that and hoped online meetings would keep connecting the world better, even after the pandemic.

Of course virtual meetings had challenges too:

❌ "Zoom fatigue": hours of screen time drained energy.
❌ Technical hiccups: unstable connections, frozen screens, scrambled words.
❌ Casual chats and spontaneous brainstorming were less easy to occur.

Back to normal

As soon as restrictions decreased, many conferences rushed back to physical meetups. We were craving for direct, personal contact. It is a fundamental human need. Some things just work better face-to-face.

The first year after the pandemic the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC) was one of the conferences that kept being held totally online. But a year later they also went back to a physical event. The advantages of in person contact were bigger than the hassle and costs of traveling.

Nowadays there are several JUGs online, like JUG London, JUG D-A-CH Online, and recently the Code Along JUG.

It is nice to have a mix of physical and virtual places to meet available.

There are also some recent advantages of online meetings, mostly due to developments in Artificial Intelligence:
✅ Automatic caption generation.
✅ Automatic translation.

JDay USA: Best of Both Worlds!

In recent years JDay USA has developed a total mix  of both a physical and virtual conference. Both speakers and attendees can be online or in person for all sessions! Zoom was used during every part of the program: opening, workshops, presentations, documentation-bugs & fun and even during the virtual lunches.

Although technically this only needs a couple of Zoom-accounts, it demands quite a bit of organisation to have a moderator available for every session, who is responsible for the recording of the session, introducing the speaker, keeping an eye on the chat, guarding the time, so the next session can start after only a 10 minutes break, solving network problems, assuring the right microphones are muted or unmuted. In order to run this all smoothly everything was prepared, documented and discussed, while there were always some extra people available to help. This was truly an organisational feat!

My Joomla Family

Attending JDay USA in person brought back the feeling of me and my Joomla family.

Direct conversations and contacts are so much more impactful, it was good to experience it again. Presenting for real people, having eye contact, is a 100% difference from only speaking online, talking to your own screen.

Elisa organised a morning run, just like we did 10-15 years ago. 

During the mini-PBF we had a room with people wanting to help with documentation. But also people online. I was totally stuck, and didn't know how to handle those two at the same time. Wasn’t really prepared for that. I immediately got help, people taking care of the online participants and technique. And someone from the documentation team taking care of the online registrations. It worked out very well, with people discussing and thinking about better documentation. And several good suggestions on how to proceed in our quest to use Joomla for documentation.

Sitting together during our dinners, talking about everything and nothing, eating and drinking and having fun is so valuable. “Joomla Rocks” was the phrase of the night at the piano bar: 

JDay USA is unique in many ways: the combination of 2 days of presentations and a course day and the mini PBF. And for sure: the fully hybrid physical/virtual mix.

Thank you!

Thank you very much everyone who made it possible that I could attend JDay USA 2025 in person. Thank you sponsors, speakers, and attendees. Thank you OSM Board for your active online participation. And most of all: thank you for the excellent organisation, JDay USA 2025 team: