Reflections on TPAC 2024 Breakouts

At TPAC 2024, this year's edition of W3C’s big annual meeting, attendees proposed a record number of breakouts (87) compared to 69 in 2023. We identified some prominent themes among the sessions:

• AI
• Identity
• Wallets
• Web Apps
• Web Components
• Feature lifecycle
• Permissions
• Real-time Web

There were many other sessions on both technical topics and ideas for improving incubation and standardization at W3C. We invite you to check out the agendas, minutes, and slide decks available from the breakouts page.

As is the custom, we survey TPAC attendees and have already heard both enthusiasm for this year's breakouts and ideas to improve them. Here's a sample of support:

• "At first I was overwhelmed by the many breakout sessions, but it didn't take me long to determine which I wanted to attend. These were excellent, and a great way to get people to mix together and discuss a broad range of things. I particularly loved the Web on the Moon session in the afternoon."
• "The breakouts are the best part of TPAC and I wish there was more space for them."
• "Very dense, very useful, many conflicts to manage because of many interesting sessions."
• "Breakouts were great, and there was only one instance where two sessions I wanted to attend conflicted."

It is easy to detect in these encouraging comments (hand-selected for this post, yes, but also representative) a recurring theme: the number of sessions in parallel created conflicts. We wrestled with that issue in the planning phases. We anticipated over 500 attendees (which came true) and chose to allocate enough breakout rooms to accommodate them. We ended up with 15 sessions in parallel during each time slot, which created ample choice for some and conflicts for others.

We have some ideas for improving the situation. For example, we want to enable all TPAC attendees to participate in breakouts, but we recognize that, in practice, not all of them do. We think we can improve our strategy so that we schedule fewer sessions during a given time slot without overcrowding rooms or turning people away.

Several people have suggested that we add more breakout sessions to other days of the week, which would help, but involves other tradeoffs because traditionally groups want enough time for their meetings on other days.

After TPAC 2023, we also heard feedback about attendee conflicts, so we organized our first fully remote, non-TPAC Breakouts Day in March 2024 to handle some of the overflow; see the related blog post. We anticipate organizing a similar event in early 2025.

Beyond scheduling considerations, we have also received (and continue to receive) suggestions for other enhancements, including making time for follow-up discussions for some of the breakouts later in the week, making it easier to organize one's breakouts day experience, and providing more guidance to session chairs. We look forward to hearing other suggestions (via GitHub issues) to improve breakouts for attendees and encourage topics that are most relevant to the community.