"Virtual" Connections 2020 Running Thread

[bayonetbrant]

The planned session breakdown

[blackndecker]

I'll be "there." Anyone else planning to attend? Trying to decide on attending the "social."

[bayonetbrant]

I'll be "there." Anyone else planning to attend? Trying to decide on attending the "social."

I'll be listening in on a variety of the panels, but I'm not on the entire thing all 5 days, and the social is very much a long-shot for me

[Tolstoi]

I'll be "there." Anyone else planning to attend? Trying to decide on attending the "social."

I watched the opening/welcome session with Colonel Caffrey and then I watched the last session of the day in Room A, "Building Wargaming Capacity in the University." I'm looking forward to Dr. Sabin's keynote on Wednesday. When I saw bayonetbrant write a message in the chat, I almost replied, "The Armchair Dragoons are in the house!", but decided against it. 

I also saw Brant and Sebastian Bae chatting, so maybe there will be a future episode of Mentioned in Dispatches with Mr. Bae? 

The social looked interesting, but I didn't attend. Did you decide to participate?

[bayonetbrant]

We are definitely having Sebastian as a podcast guest this fall and it talked about it for a while now.

I did make it to the social for a little while, and so did blackndecker.

Since I'm working these sessions in around my day job, I can't be at every one of them, nor give my full attention to every one of them. But it's a whole lot better than the last few years when I couldn't go at all

[Tolstoi]

We are definitely having Sebastian as a podcast guest this fall and it talked about it for a while now.

I did make it to the social for a little while, and so did blackndecker.

Since I'm working these sessions in around my day job, I can't be at every one of them, nor give my full attention to every one of them. But it's a whole lot better than the last few years when I couldn't go at all

What was the online social like? I'm glad to read Sebastian will be a guest in a future Mentioned in Dispatches. Very cool.

My schedule doesn't allow me to watch the entire conference either. I hope to watch sessions I miss when they upload the recordings later. I'm very grateful they decided to put this online at no cost to the participants this year. It is one of the few positive consequences from the pandemic. As much as I have wanted to attend past Connections, there's no way I could afford the travel costs, so this opportunity to watch it online is great.

[bayonetbrant]

I was only really "present" for about 35-40 minutes, as I was on a work conf call for my day job for the first part of it, and then had KP for the second part.  But here's a snippet....

https://twitter.com/PG_Crdbl_Hlk/status/1293129867593220097

[blackndecker]

The social was ok, although awkward at one point. It was mainly attended by people in the community who know eachother fairly well, some are "names" in the professional wargaming community and others were newcomers like myself. Mostly just those friends visiting and catching up. I find these a little hard to attend, being introverted and new makes it easy to spectate. Fortunately, the live Connections UK event I attended last year began to play out the same way, until one of the attendees approached and broke the ice. Led to a fantastic discussion with some other attendees and set a great tone. But again, that's me.

Adding some additional context for the tweet that Brant posted, the awkward bit was when one attendee at last night's social began to recount a war story about a previous game. A "video" was used to set the scene about Brazil and the speaker admitted he'd not known that the video depicted women during Carnival and the attire that Brazilian women might wear during that event. The speaker recounted that a game participant raised concern that video was unfortunate or inappropriate (I'm being delicate). If the conversation had stopped there as an example of some of the challenges of impromptu use of the internets during a game, then that would be one thing. But the discussion in the voice track continued to focus on other areas of Brazilian culture and women's attire (still being delicate).

The online chat had a few people really start to pipe up and encourage the conversation to move on, describing the content as inappropriate. I don't think the speaker or others were really following the chat. One chat participants flagged for the only (apparently) woman in the session to speak up...which led her to ask of this participant why she as the only woman should be the one to speak up. Ultimately, the discussion moved along. I punched out for dinner a short while later.

[bayonetbrant]

Graham Longley-Brown's talk from this afternoon

[blackndecker]

Graham's talk was excellent and built off of an already compelling presentation that he did at Connections UK in 2019. His use of the thought maps was genius and it really came through during the session. If people don't have his book, they should seriously think about grabbing it.

Today was a strong follow-up to yesterday's sessions, especially with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work's key note presentation. I hadn't seen it posted yet, but it is supposed to be up shortly. Several references to how different Chinese military writings/thinkers are approaching future warfare -- I STRONGLY hesitate to call alot of what Work described as doctrine -- and the role of wargaming in the Third Offset Strategy. Work noted that he'd wished he'd heard of the Connections community when he was in the Pentagon and he guessed that current leadership probably didn't either. Maybe if he gets another run in the Pentagon, he may come back and leverage the Connections community for broader good.

I skipped the session on the SIGNAL game to instead listen to the Finance wargaming discussion. A fascinating discussion of how the financial sector is using games and scenario exercises to stress test their organizations in a manner consistent with the Dodd-Frank legislation after the 2008/9 financial crisis. Noted that the financial sector now has ten years of experience in this area (at least) and that their professional "wargamers" are usually titled as crisis planning experts or as "event planners." One other interesting comment was that "red" often consists of the US Government.

John Hanley's discussion on the cycle of learning mainly focused on AI issues, but as usually he offered some brilliant context to the discussion. The money quote of the brief -- for me -- was his comment that one play of a game is not the game and that the cycle of learning required more than one play of a game. He also noted that the community has been essentially trapped in conducting variations of kriegsspiel, but that maybe AI can help with that. (I've butchered this badly, but it's what I took down hurriedly.)

Couple of other sessions, but not much to remark on. I didn't flip back and forth through meetings too much.

[bayonetbrant]

I enjoyed the keynote. I watched part of the presentation on SIGNAL. GLB's talk was really good, but it seemed to be trying to cover too many different kinds of games instead of just focusing on analytical or training or exploratory or some specific type.

The talk on OSINT in AI was pretty crappy. I was looking for a lot more information on using open sources to actually calculate or inform information in a wargame, and they were using AI/ML to help interpret and categorize open source data on boat and aircraft movement to try and pick out military versus civilian craft
It's an interesting application of AI and machine learning but it had almost nothing to do with wargaming and very little to do with how you would incorporate OSINT into a war game. Two of the three questions I got to ask for mine and they were both focused on individual level information that can be pulled from open sources, and how things like GDPR will impact it

[Tolstoi]

The social was ok, although awkward at one point. ...which led her to ask of this participant why she as the only woman should be the one to speak up. Ultimately, the discussion moved along. I punched out for dinner a short while later.

Wow. Awkward in deed. Thank you for the recap, I appreciate it.

[Tolstoi]

John Hanley's discussion on the cycle of learning mainly focused on AI issues, but as usually he offered some brilliant context to the discussion. The money quote of the brief -- for me -- was his comment that one play of a game is not the game and that the cycle of learning required more than one play of a game. He also noted that the community has been essentially trapped in conducting variations of kriegsspiel, but that maybe AI can help with that. (I've butchered this badly, but it's what I took down hurriedly.)

Thank you for the recap of what you watched today. Very informative. I see some of the PowerPoints and presentation notes have been posted. I don't see anything leading to the recordings yet.

I was only able to watch John Hanley's session and I missed the first 7 or so minutes of that. I think you summarized his session well. I too liked it and agree, his remark about needing to play the game more than once is very insightful. I also thought it was interesting/funny when he started talking about big data. Peter Perla chimed in the chat, "big data works until it doesn’t. and that’s when it kills you".

[bayonetbrant]

I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention

[blackndecker]

I had Hanley's talk in the background while I was working on something else. Honestly, I found the chat more interesting than the talk he was giving, but part of that might've been my available attention

That's fair. I do think think that the chat is almost like a second conference...there is fascinating stuff in there...hope it gets captured.