Very valid point @khkey, and I am glad you brought that up!
At the start of this forum, very soon a number of Meetup groups started forming, and quickly we had over 22 of them. Frequent posts announcing meetups being planned and organized, inviting people to join. Face-to-face interaction happened - which is so important as you rightfully mention.
These meetup groups - most of them I think - still do exist, but they stopped posting to this forum. Some of them are quite large, relatively, having many members that are not on this forum.
As part of Aware Prepare I intend to bring that activity back again, and you Karen, and everyone else can help me with that.
The community will get its own website that we can maintain ourselves, and that could have a meetups.humanetech.community section where there is a shared calendar of all face-to-face activity and other gatherings, like your proposed conference. Furthermore each meetup group can have their own web section, e.g. amsterdam.humanetech.community, sanfrancisco.humanetech.community, etc.
Besides meetups we can organize hackathons, and I brought up the idea of organizing a yearly synchronized hackathon between all of our meetup groups. We can become very creative in bonding, getting to know each other better, sharing culture and community vibe.
I suggest the Campaigners team will hold a number of video calls to discuss plans, and for our actual campaigns people will come together to create video’s, do interviews on the street, organize flash mobs and stunts… (as long as there is interest, but we first need to organize).
We are a global community, so we’ll need that digital medium that binds us. But that does not mean we should just be a forum, like we are now.
How soon all of this happens? That depends on our concerted efforts and ideas 