Category Archives: Events

May 13 2013
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Events

How to run a tech conference part 7: The Day Of!

This is the seventh post in my series on running a tech conference. In today’s post, I’ll outline what you need to do on the day of your event.

  1. Getting Started: Goals and Vision
  2. Choosing a Venue
  3. Budget and Sponsors
  4. Finding Speakers
  5. Event Logistics & Timeline
  6. Promotion of your Event
  7. The Day Of!
  8. Post Event

Being Prepared

Before the event starts, you should expect that things may go awry. Every event brings a new adventure and sometimes you can’t anticipate what the issues will be. From experience, I will tell you a few things that you should be prepared for but sometimes it’s impossible to know what the universe will bring. At MongoDB London this year, we had a terrible problem with door wedges. Yes, door wedges — the venue didn’t have enough, and there were several spots where we were desperately improvising door jams or stationing staff at the doors so they wouldn’t slam during talks. Maybe next time I’ll pack a door wedge in my conference kit, but even if I do that I know that next time there could be some other unanticipated issue so I’ll just have to be ready for it.

The Walk Through

The day before your event, assemble your staff of volunteers and walk through the space and your staff assignments. Make sure that everyone knows who is responsible for staffing registration, who is responsible for each speaking room, the expo hall, and any other areas. It also helps to have a “floater” who can jump in in case there are gaps or if someone doesn’t show on the day of the event. We also have staff designated to greet press and high-profile speakers.

At Open Tech NYC, the night before the event my co-organizer suggested an exercise that was very useful. We walked through the event, but then we also discussed all the different ways that things could go wrong and how we could possibly mitigate those issues. It was really helpful for identifying different logistical problems.

Final Rehearsals

The first several events that I organized were fairly small and we had no process for formally preparing speakers. As 10gen has grown, we’ve taken presenting more seriously as a skill set that needs development. We try to organize several prep meetings for each presentation before the event, and we’re experimenting with office hours for our external presenters as well. On the days leading up to the event, a final run through, particularly in the space where the talk will be delivered, is a great way to ensure a good experience at the event. These can be difficult to schedule, especially with set up happening in parallel, but they can make a huge difference in the quality of your presentations.

Set Up

If at all possible when booking your venue, I recommend getting the space booked the night before so that you have the prior day to set up. Sometimes this isn’t possible from a cost standpoint, but logistically it’s extremely challenging to do set up at 5am and then be on your feet all day for an event.

The key things that you need to do include:

  • Posting directional signage, banners, and any other conference branding
  • Printing, inserting, organizing and setting up name tags in your registration areas
  • Stuffing your give-away bags (here is my article on how to efficiently stuff swag bags)
  • Getting your vendor hall labeled and set up
  • Testing your A/V equipment and wireless connection
  • Doing any final presentation rehearsals or run throughs

A few small details that you should always remember:

  • Mac adaptors and slide advancers for each room
  • Random supplies such as paper, tape, scissors, Sharpies, etc. in case you need to make signs
  • Bottled water for your presenters so they aren’t parched
  • Extra blank name tags in case someone’s badge didn’t get printed

The more that you can pre-stage and set up in the days leading up to the event, the happier you will be.

Registration

There are several options for printing nametags, which I enumerated in detail in the blog post on budget and sponsors. For the day of the event, I recommend purchasing trays to organize your name tags and easily find each person. For every 100-150 people expected to register per day, you probably want 1 person on registration at peak hours. (So at MongoSF this year, which was a 1-day event with roughly 1,000 attendees, we had roughly 10 people on registration during the 8-9:30am peak hours.)

Make sure that you set up you clearly label registration with signage, and consider positioning a greeter at the entrance if the direction isn’t obvious. Be wary of creating bottlenecks at any point in the registration process!

Once people have their name tag, you may also want to check them in using an app such as Eventbrite check-in or Marketo check-in, or an old-fashioned printed list. We use iPads at our events to quickly sign people in. Usually one person finds the badge and the other checks them in, and the process takes about 30 seconds. Once they’ve checked in, an automated email is sent to the attendee with information about the event, the venue, and further activities during the conference.

Breakdown

Usually we’re so excited about the event wrapping up, that we forget about the hard work at the end of the conference. It helps to have a detailed inventory of the items that you brought with you to the event and the places that you’ve stored them. If you had boxes that you packed things in, keep them handy for the end of the event with shipping labels at the ready so that you can quickly get everything boxed up. Ideally you’ll have a small breakdown crew that can get everything organized and then the rest of the team can go to the bar or social event with the conference guests.

Have Fun

In my experience, the most stressful part of conference organizing is the hours leading up to the start of the event. Once we’re through registration and the first talks have started, that’s when it starts to get really enjoyable for me. I can interact with the guests, attend a few talks myself, get feedback on the conference, and learn from our partners. Events are a lot of work and effort, but also very rewarding.

Mar 31 2013
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Community, Events, Open Source

Open Tech NYC Recap

After several months of preparation, yesterday we held Open Tech NYC, a conference dedicated to exploring how open source and open technologies are powering the New York City innovation community. I organized the event with my colleague, Justin Dunham, and partnered with the Coalition for Queens, a local non-profit that is fostering the tech ecosystem in Queens.

The Sessions

When we were planning the conference, Justin and I spent a lot of time talking with Jukay, Ben, and David from Coalition for Queens on what audience we wanted to attract and how technical we wanted to go. While we wanted to draw a fairly technical audience, we also wanted to keep the sessions high-level enough that those that were new to open technologies could be introduced to this world.

For a single-track event, I was thrilled with the diversity of people, experiences, and topics that were covered. It’s tough to please everyone in a single track event but overall I was happy with the balance that we struck. Here is an overview of what was discussed at Open Tech NYC.

Sumana Harihareswara introduces you to your Open Tech neighbors

The conference kicked off with Sumana Harihareswara of the Wikimedia Foundation providing a broad overview of all of the interesting open source, open hardware, open data, and open culture happenings around the city. Despite a lingering cold, Sumana’s charisma, humor and energy shone through and was the perfect way to begin the day. This morning Sumana summarized in a blog post 50 links to institutions and events in the city, which is a great collection of resources for those of any background interested in getting involved in the open tech community. Below are some of my favorite moments from Sumana’s talk.

Joel Natividad on Open Data and Open Source: The Wonder Twins of Civic Hacking

Joel Natividad, the founder and CEO of Ontodia, presented on open data in the context of New York City’s Open Data Law, which mandates that the city’s various agencies provide access to their data. As citizens, we produce all sorts of fascinating information through our actions: metrocard swipes, 311 service requests, parking tickets, graffiti, and on and on and on.

With this data open and available, Joel explained that we can challenge our traditional view of government as a “vending machine” in which we put in money and receive services. We can start to participate in the conversation by building applications that take advantage of the information that is produced. There are, however, challenges to working with this open data. As Joel explains, each city agency has been collecting data over time in a silo, and there is no standardization across agencies. His company, Ontodia, aims to address this challenge by helping to do the data wrangling and normalization so that anyone can manipulate this powerful data.

Alan Hudson on 3D printing and open source at Shapeways

Alan Hudson, the Director of 3D Tools at Shapeways, talked about the 3D printing process, Shapeways’ factory in Long Island City, and the open source software that they use. Alan explained how open source enabled startup velocity, not only for Shapeways but for the designers that upload designs on their site to print. For example, he showed how the Steampunk iPhone case went through 9 different designs and $6,000 of sales over the course of a year. In parallel, Shapeways itself maintains over 2 million lines of code and relies heavily on open source to enable iterative development of their product.

Jon Gottfried on the History of the Hackathon

Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, where he goes to hundreds of events and hackathons to talk about the Twilio API. His talk gave an overview of the different types of hackathons, from community-focused open source hackathons to brand-focused hacakthons with prizes. He cited my favorite hackathon, hackNY, which brings students from around the northeast to New York City to work with local startups and receive mentorship from the local tech community. Jon’s call to arms at the end was to focus on why we come together for these types of events, emphasize the community aspects of hackathons and celebrate the art of building.

Vanessa Hurst on Developers for Good

Vanessa Hurst explained how, while working as a programmer for a financial institution she was looking for a way to apply her technical skills in a more fulfilling way. She started an organization called Developers for Good to connect non-profits with people who have technical expertise. She explained that many non-profits benefit from open source since most don’t realize that most of their needs are solved by open source tools such as WordPress. She further explained that for her, helping a non-profit was often the motivation that she needed to learn a new technology. After the event, I felt inspired to join the Developers for Good meetup group.

Michael Li visualizes NYC using foursquare’s check-in data

Michael Li‘s talk generated a ton of conversation and excitement. He presented several fascinating data visualizations based on the foursquare check-in data set. For example, he showed us a moving map of color-coded New York City check-ins by time of day, showing how the city wakes up and moves from the outer boros and burbs into midtown for work, then shifting to lunch and shopping destinations and eventually to night life spots. He presented a graph that demonstrated that for every degree increase in weather, people are 2.1% more likely to buy ice cream. He also showed us the graph of check-ins to popular places like Grey’s Papaya, which had a clear 3am post-clubbing surge in check-ins :)

After all of this “data porn” Michael showed the underlying technologies that foursquare leverages as well as the machine learning principles that he applies to determine venue recommendations.

Andy Parsons on the New York City Startup Stack

Our final talk of the day came from Andy Parsons, the CTO and Co-Founder of Happify and serial New York City entrepreneur. Andy began his talk with an anecdote about a startup that he was part of during the late 90′s that had a major outage. While the majority of the stack was .NET, a forward thinking engineer had suggested that they use Postgres, an open source database. During that outage, the only part of the infrastructure that didn’t go down was the database — because he was able to see the underlying source code. That experience gave Andy the insight that using open technologies was a more pragmatic approach.

Andy also talked about the importance of community. He referenced a dinner for entrepreneurs that he and I frequent where the organizers says “If you leave without helping someone, you’ve failed.” Andy encouraged everyone to give back to the community, whether it’s through contributing code, open sourcing a project, or sharing knowledge in a blog post or talk.

The Event Overall

Overall, I enjoyed all of the presentations and learned something from each of the talks. When we started planning the event, we decided to start with a smaller, single track event to see what the response was to make sure that we didn’t take on more than we could handle. I’m glad we went with this approach, because with 180 registered, the event was intimate enough that we could do Q&A during each session and have good conversations during the breaks and at lunch.

The venue was also amazing, with rooftop space and an amazing view of the city that everyone enjoyed. We lucked out with incredible weather on one of the first beautiful days of spring. Everyone could sit in the sunshine between talks.

The Next Event?

Now that the first Open Tech NYC is complete, I’m already thinking about what to do next with the event. Justin wants to organize a second event this year, which is both exciting and daunting. For those of you who were at the event, I’d love to hear in the comments your thoughts and feedback on the conference and what we can do better next time.

Thanks

Thank you to all of the amazing speakers: Sumana, Joel, Alan, Jon, Vanessa, Michael, and Andy

Thank you to Jukay Hsu, Ben Wei, and David Yang at the Coalition for Queens for partnering with Justin and me on the event.

Thank you to Joyride for the coffee, StackOverflow for lunch, Send Tech for the wireless, Team Bubbly for the video production.

Thank you to everyone who came to the first event, and special thanks to volunteers Andrew Morrow, Ian Whalen, Dan Crosta, Andy Dirnberger for helping with set up and registration.

Thank you Justin for motivating me to do this!

Feb 11 2013
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Community, Events, NYC, Open Source

Open Source Conference in NYC

I’m really excited to announce a side project that I’ve been working on with my colleague, Justin Dunham. We are organizing an open source conference in New York City!

Open Tech NYC on March 30 in Queens, NY

Since it’s the first time we are organizing the event, we are running it on a shoestring with support from the Coalition for Queens, who is providing the space for free. It’s a single track conference with all the speakers focused on one theme: celebrating and exploring open source in New York City and how it are contributing to the startup and innovation community in the city. So far we’ve lined up some really interesting speakers that I am personally very excited to see, including Sumana Harihareswara from the Wikimedia Foundation, Andy Parsons from Happify, Alan Hudson from Shapeways, Jon Gottfried from Twilio, and more.

We’re keeping the conference inexpensive, fun, and interesting, and I hope that you can join us for the event. More information can be found at www.opentech2013.org.

Oct 26 2012
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Community, Events, Marketing, Sales

Measuring ROI on developer event sponsorship

I am consistently impressed by the number of great technology conferences, hackathons, and meetups organized directly by their communities. Organizers bootstrap the event with support from universities, corporations recruiting developers, and companies like 10gen that offer technology products and services.

Since 10gen frequently falls into the categories above, organizers of these grassroots events contact me about supporting them through sponsorship. Hence I thought that I would provide some insight into the evolution of my thinking when it comes to investing in community events.

When I joined 10gen, we were completely focused on adoption, educating the community about MongoDB, and gaining traction. We spoke at local user groups and any conferences that would be interested in learning about NoSQL. We sponsored events to get exposure, but we had a tiny marketing budget so I always negotiated the lowest tier.

As the company grew and hired a sales team, it became necessary to think more critically about how we invest our marketing dollars into developer events. We also had lead generation targets to meet, and events seemed like a great way to accomplish that. It soon became clear that we needed to be more systematic in how we evaluated participation in events.

Initially, it was tempting to measure the success of our participation in an event by looking at the number of leads we gathered, and the subsequent activity. Leads are a concrete, measurable metric, and we can clearly track the conversion to a sales opportunity. This approach biased us towards doing larger sponsorships where we could have a booth. When we have had booths at events, we are able to scan visitors, get their contact information, and sell to them. And with a bigger marketing budget, it seemed logical that we invest in a larger presence at events.

However, after investing in many expensive trade shows, it became evident that the value of a few hundred email addresses couldn’t justify the tens of thousands of dollars that we would have to spend on a booth rental, travel, handouts, and staff time. In addition, the people we met in these booths were generally new to MongoDB. I felt that the conversations we had were valuable for adoption, but most of the leads were not ready for a conversation with a sales rep.

Anecdotally, I knew that the interactions at these events were having an impact. For example, at a MongoDB conference this year, I spoke with a large enterprise customer who told me that they first heard about MongoDB at OSCON two years prior, when one of my colleagues presented. We didn’t sponsor that year, so our investment was just travel and time. It was impossible to track that particular conversion, but that presentation was clearly crucial to that customer’s adoption of MongoDB.

We needed a broader framework for measuring value of each component of event participation. For each event, we started to look at all of the benefits of participation, and assign monetary values to them. What is it worth to us to have 100 people sitting in a room listening to a presentation about MongoDB? How about an attendee speaking with an engineer? How many of those conversations can we have at an event? What’s the value of everyone at the conference going home with a MongoDB coffee mug?

We enumerate each of the items of value associated with participating in the event, assign dollar values, estimate the number of impressions, and total. We then compare to the cost and use this data to prioritize the events. We try to align our budget according to the company expansion and sales goals, so that we are investing in the right territories and so that we don’t end up spread too thin.

Interestingly, I feel that we’ve come full circle: we started as a scrappy startup doing small sponsorships, talking to people at user groups, networking in the hallway track. We experimented with bigger events, but came to the conclusion that the real value of events isn’t in a huge booth, but in the meaningful interactions that we have with individuals. It’s harder to measure this, but it’s a philosophy that is increasingly informing my thought process. Over time, I have started to internalize the values from this model and it’s immediately evident the type of investments we should make.

Based on this model, our approach is increasingly shifting from large trade shows to supporting lots of small community events with small sponsorships. When we participate in an event, we emphasize sending the right speaker and encourage them to work the hallway track. I think that this approach maximizes our reach.

In the next few weeks, I will write a follow up post about how we measure the value of our MongoDB conferences, using some more concrete values.

Oct 10 2012
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Events

How to run a tech conference part 6: promotion of your event

This is the sixth post in my series on running a tech conference. In today’s post, I’ll detail the strategies for promoting your event and getting people to register.

  1. Getting Started: Goals and Vision
  2. Choosing a Venue
  3. Budget and Sponsors
  4. Finding Speakers
  5. Event Logistics & Timeline
  6. Promotion of your Event
  7. The Day Of!
  8. Post Event

Be compelling

Before you announce your conference, you should build a series of messages for each communication channel (email, twitter, blog, etc.) that convey the value of your event. You not only want to get people excited about the content, you need to provide a compelling reason to register.

Demonstrate value through great content

It’s not easy to justify taking a day (or many days) away from the office to attend a conference. Attendees need to be able to show their boss that going to the conference is a valuable use of time and money. You can make that justification easier by demonstrating educational content. O’Reilly takes this to the next level by assembling a business case for each conference to help attendees justify to their bosses the value of attending events such as OSCON.

Ultimately, people attend conferences because they expect a great experience with lots of valuable content. The earlier that you can lock in quality speakers and publish an agenda — even a draft — the better. You want to have interesting content to point prospective attendees to in your messaging.

Make it clear at registration what the cost of the conference ticket includes: admission to sessions, meals, after-parties, networking sessions, swag, and more. Most conference attendees have never run a conference and probably don’t understand the economics. You need to demonstrate to them that it’s worth their money.

Set deadlines

As I have mentioned in previous posts, it’s important to create compelling events to encourage registration. In my experience with MongoDB Days, everyone waits until the last minute to sign up. We are able to get earlier registration by promoting our heavily discounted early bird pricing (which ends 30-45 days before the conference) and our come-as-a-group special (which ends 1-2 weeks before the conference). You can also reward early registrants with a special conference t-shirt or other goodies to encourage sign ups.

Be social

At every opportunity, make registration viral. Encourage people to invite friends, make it easy to share the details on social media, and offer group discounts. Most people find out about events from their friends, so facilitate sharing.

Get the word out

With the principles above in mind, it’s time to start to spread the word about your event. There are many channels to promote your conference, and it’s important to hit as many as possible to ensure maximum reach.

Email marketing

If you have a mailing list, you’ll want to prepare a series of mailings to those on the list leading up to the event. If you don’t have a mailing list, consider setting one up so that people can subscribe for updates on your event. You may not benefit from the mailing list in the first year, but as the event grows, you’ll benefit from having a database of contacts that you can reach out to.

You can supplement your own mailing list by working with other companies. You can ask your sponsors to include a message in their newsletter, or purchase ad space on a list from a similar conference.

Social Media

Like your mailing list, it will take time to accumulate fans and followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and XING. However, you will benefit from having these additional channels to reach your audience so it’s worth investing in them early. Early on, establish and publicize an official hashtag for the event, and seed the conversation with tweets from the organizers, speakers, and attendees. As you are doing email campaigns and community outreach, always include the social media links to help build a following. Tweet consistently using relevant hashtags and mentions to encourage re-tweets and gain new followers.

In addition to setting up dedicated accounts for the event, ask each of the conference speakers, sponsors, and any high-profile technologists in the area to announce their involvement on social media, and re-broadcast (RT, like, etc.) on your conference’s official channels.

Event Digests

You should make sure that your event is listed in all of the relevant event mailing lists and calendars. The following are good places to start:

In addition, research and post to local mailing lists and event calendars, such as This Week in the NYC Innovation Community or the Seattle Tech Calendar.

Announce to Relevant User Groups

Prior to an event, I usually spend several hours researching where the local technologists congregate. In most US cities, there are active groups on Meetup.com for every major programming language. I typically join the mailing lists for those groups, and lurk for a few weeks to get a feel for the culture of the meet up. If it’s a high-volume list with lots of announcements and activity, I usually simply send an announcement about the event to the group. If the group is less active, I instead reach out to the organizers to see if making an announcement about the event would be appropriate. In addition, it’s a good idea to offer a few free passes or swag that the organizers can raffle off during the next meetup. This requires some advance planning, but helps build goodwill with the groups.

Other Creative Ideas

  • Design a badge that says “I’m attending/speaking at/sponsoring” the conference that people can post on their websites (see DrupalCon, for example)
  • Sometimes publications are willing to help promote your event in exchange for being listed as a “media sponsor” and being offered press passes
  • Organize Twitter contests with free tickets as prizes using the official event hashtag

Have you seen other creative ideas for spreading the word about a tech conference? Please share them in the comments section!

Sep 18 2012
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Events

HOW TO RUN A TECH CONFERENCE PART 5: EVENT LOGISTICS & TIMELINE

This is the fifth post in my series on running a tech conference. In today’s post, I’ll outline a basic timeline for event logistics.

  1. Getting Started: Goals and Vision
  2. Choosing a Venue
  3. Budget and Sponsors
  4. Finding Speakers
  5. Event Logistics & Timeline
  6. Promotion of your Event
  7. The Day Of!
  8. Post Event

To get organized for a conference, you probably need about four months. We’ve pulled off conferences at 10gen in some cases in 6-8 weeks, but that is an extremely tight timeline. The more time that you can give yourself to line up speakers and get the word out, the better! Just bear in mind, no matter how much planning you do, there will always be a crunch period the few weeks leading up to an event. The best that you can do is be prepared for that by clearing your schedule of other obligations and lining up volunteers to help manage the last-minute details.

T – 120 days

An event isn’t real until the venue has been booked and registration page is live. Working on a four month timeline, you want to get these basic items completed 120 days in advance of the event.

  • Outline the budget
  • Book venue
  • Place tentative catering orders, with the expectation that details may change based on registration
  • Set up website and registration (for simplest registration I recommend using Eventbrite)
  • Create speaker guidelines and talk submission form; open call for speakers
  • Create sponsorship package; open call for sponsors

T – 90 days

Once the basic logistics are in place, it’s time to start getting the word out.

  • Send “save the date” and call for speakers / sponsors announcements to your mailing list, relevant forums and user groups, and via social media
  • List on any relevant tech event calendars
  • Contact any high profile speakers that you want to invite to submit talks or keynote your event
  • Begin outreach to potential sponsors of the event
  • Identify any promotional opportunities for your event (e.g. media sponsorships, mailing list rental, online advertisements, cross-promotional swaps with other events, etc.)

T – 75 days

With the event two and a half months away, you should start confirming the content of the conference.

  • CFP closes
  • Submissions reviewed and draft agenda created
  • Outreach to any speakers to fill in gaps in subject matter

In addition, you should continue promotion and start executing on any promotional opportunities that you’ve identified.

T – 60 days

As we get closer to the event, it’s time to get some of the peripheral logistics sorted out

  • Book any social events around the conference (e.g. reception, after-party, speaker dinner)
  • Design and order any promotional items (e.g. t-shirts and stickers)
  • Do the final round of sponsorship outreach

In addition to the logistical items above, you should of course continue promoting the event!

  • Announce the agenda of speakers
  • Start promoting the content on your website and in your email marketing
  • Get the speakers and sponsors to spread the word through their networks

T – 45 days

This is a good time to work ahead, so that you limit the inevitable last-minute scrambling. In particular, you’ll want to set and communicate expectations for the speakers and sponsors on deadlines for logistical items.

  • Put together staff, sponsor, and speaker information guides with all of the information that they need about the event (speaking expectations, location, etc.) – we put these on a wiki page for easy reference by the participants
  • Prepare email templates for future communication (e.g. reminders about deliverables such as slides)
  • Outline the schedule of shifts for the various staff members
  • Send an email to registered attendees with instructions for preparing for the event, and encourage them to spread the word and invite friends
  • Reach out to reporters or analysts to discuss the event and how they’d benefit from attending or reporting on the activity

T – 30 days

About a month prior to the conference is when you want to start finalizing the basic content, sponsors, and logistics so that you can focus on refining.

  • Final promotional push related to early bird pricing; expect to have 65% of the tickets sold once early bird ends
  • Deadline for sponsors to sign on (any later than this and they may miss the opportunity to be included in print materials)
  • Remind sponsors that they must provide any materials (e.g. logo, short description) for website, email marketing, conference program, etc.
  • Deadline for speakers draft talks and make any final tweaks to talk titles, abstracts, and bios for inclusion in print materials

T – 21 days

With three weeks to spare, it’s time to get as much of the print work completed as possible. This is why it’s so important to get your speakers and sponsors confirmed with 30 days to spare!

  • Design any collateral (signage, agendas, conference program, swag, etc.)
  • Send all design work to printer
  • Design a name tag template, but do not print as you will likely have people registering up until the last week

This is also a good time to send a first round of feedback to speakers on their slides.

T – 14 days

Hopefully if you’ve been planning well, you should be well organized for the final two weeks before the event.

  • Finalize staff schedule and send calendar invites for shifts
  • Schedule a logistical call for all staff and volunteers to review roles and responsibilities

T – 7 days

With one week to go, your main job is communication with the various participants.

  • Hold staff logistics meeting to review roles and responsibilites
  • Send final speaker and sponsor logistical reminders
  • Make the final push for registration
  • Confirm all bookings and contracts
  • Mail and freight items should be shipped to the venue, along with return shipping labels for any items that will be shipped back

T – 2 days

With two days to spare, you will mostly be putting out fires: a speaker with a last minute conflict, last-minute registrants with questions, and volunteers with questions. In addition, there are a few final items to get done before the big day:

  • Final reminder to attendees with logistical information
  • Track any packages to make sure that everything arrives on time
  • Pack your conference survival kit, including Mac adaptors, slide clickers, scissors, tape, sharpies, and power bars
  • Print name tags

The event

I will cover all of the “day of!” logistics in part 7 of this series!

After the event

Once the event is over, there is a considerable amount of follow up work to be done.

  • Send thank you emails and gifts to speakers and sponsors
  • Send thank you email to attendees with a survey for feedback
  • Gather and post slides and videos in central place and promote via social media, conference newsletter, etc.

This post should give you a sense of the complexity of organizing a large scale conference. In the next post in the series, we’ll talk about best practices for promoting your conference.

Jul 30 2012
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Community Leadership Summit, Events, Presentations

Can Webinars Die Now?

At Community Leadership Summit, Tamao Nakahara from VMware led a session called “Can Webinars Die Now?!” It was a lively discussion on the challenges of engaging and educating communities through online events. We all agreed that organizing events online is a great way to reach a broader audience, but execution of a high-quality online event is very difficult. The “slides on a screen” webinar format isn’t very engaging, and has become a form of lazy marketing. In our CLS session, we brainstormed lots of methods for moving beyond the standard webinar, many of which I will share below.

Platforms and tools

There’s no perfect tool for online event, but there are many options that provide different degrees of interactivity. Here are some tools and platforms to consider:

  • GoToMeeting: GoToMeeting offers a paid webinar product to share screen, webcam, and audio. It also provides international dial-in numbers. Having used many of these platforms, I would consider it the most feature-rich. However, we’ve opted against using it at 10gen because it doesn’t officially support Linux. (Many of our participants are using Linux.)
  • WebEx: Webex is a Cisco product providing screen and document sharing, audio broadcasts, and dial-in numbers. Unlike GoToMeeting, you can’t view the speaker while they are presenting. While it (mostly) has cross-platform support, in my experience, it can be a bit finnicky. When it works, it’s awesome, but we almost always have users that can’t log in for inexplicable reasons.
  • Adobe Connect: I’ve been consistently impressed with O’Reilly webcasts, which uses Adobe Connect for their sessions. It’s one of the more expensive options but seems to have less issues than WebEx.
  • Google+ Hangouts On Air: A Google Hangout provides a video and audio meeting in browser. While the number of participants in a Hangout is limited to 10 people, you can stream that meeting to a larger audience using the On Air feature. The recording is then published to YouTube. Using G+ requires a Gmail account, and their may be accessibility issues in China and at large cooperations that block social networks. (For more info, check out tips and tricks for hangouts on air.)
  • Streaming platforms like Justin.tv, uStream, and LiveStream are also worth investigating.
  • Wacom: Wacom produces tablets for interactive writing, drawing, and white boarding. With screen sharing using one of the platforms above, integrating the Wacom can make a session far more interactive and engaging. We recently used Wacom for an online MongoDB conference and it was a huge success. However, we had to spend some time with the presenters beforehand to get them comfortable using the tool — it takes some practice to be proficient.

Case Studies

With so many possible tools and formats for online events, it’s interesting to see how different organizations put it all together. Here are some real world examples of successful online events.

MongoDB Online Conference

The CLS session proposal was particularly timely for me, as we recently hosted our first MongoDB Online Conference. It was a two-track conference, with presentations broadcast via WebEx and live Q&A using Justin.tv with a Wacom tablet. We hired a film crew to record the event so that the presenter could focus on presenting, and not on the technology or switching between screens. The presentations sessions and Q&A are now posted online if you’d like to get an idea of how the event went.

We’re now in the process of planning our second online conference, which will be focused on MongoDB version 2.2. This time, we decided to do a single track using Justin.tv. While Justin.tv doesn’t provide registration as WebEx does, the audio quality and the ability to show video of the presenter made it a better experience for the attendees.

CloudCamp Online

Dave Nielsen, the prolific organizer of CloudCamps, participated in the CLS session to share his experiences bringing unconferences online. Dave has successfully organized and facilitated dozens of unconferences around the world where people can exchange ideas on cloud computing. In an unconference, the schedule of session is organized by participants on the day of the event. It’s already a chaotic process in person, so I was surprised to hear that Dave attempted this format online!

Dave organized a two-hour event with 250 participants. In order to simplify the scheduling process, the online unconference was a single track event. He used UserVoice to let people propose and vote on sessions, scheduling the most popular sessions at the beginning of the conference. The sessions took place using GoToWebinar, where attendees could use the “hand raising” functionality to ask questions. There was also a chat room for backchannel conversations.

Alfresco Virtual Meetup

The Alfresco team organized a virtual meetup using Google Hangout on Air. Jeff Potts, the Chief Community Officer, moderated the session. Rather than show slides, he made the session interactive and conversational. Google Hangout allows up to 10 presenters who can broadcast video and audio online. The live stream was embedded on the Alfresco web sites, and after the event was published on YouTube. YouTube also has some light editing capabilities so they could clean up the broadcast after the event. The Alfresco team plans to make these tech talks a monthly event in order to better engage the community.

One drawback is that there isn’t a registration system built into Google Hangouts, which makes it challenging to track participation and follow up with viewers after the event.

Ultimately, content is key

After lots of discussion on the tools and formats, the CLS discussion group reached the conclusion that a better technology platform won’t fix a boring slide deck. Online or in-person, creating great content is crucial for a successful event. And unlike at a conference or a meetup where you have a (mostly) captive audience, during a webinar there are many more opportunities for attendees to zone out, get distracted, or start multi-tasking.

The purpose of a live, online event should be to make the experience as interesting and interactive as possible. Otherwise, people can watch a video on the topic or read about it in the docs or a book. Having a face on the screen can make a huge difference in engaging people, as can using interactive tools during your online session.

For more information on this section, please see the notes on the CLS Wiki.

Jul 27 2012
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Community, Community Leadership Summit, Events, Open Source

Community Leadership Summit and OSCON 2012

This year I participated in Community Leadership Summit (CLS) and OSCON (Open Source Convention). Community Leadership Summit brings together community managers around the world for a free, two-day unconference the weekend prior to OSCON. Like last year, it was an amazing event and I look forward to sharing what I learned on my blog.

A participatory event

In an unconference, the attendees drive the content. Any attendee can pitch a session in the morning, and together we organize the schedule on a giant poster board. Unlike a traditional conference where attendees attend sessions and receive information from a series of individual presenters, an unconference forces everyone to participate and share their expertise. This gives attendees access to the diverse experiences and knowledge from all of the people at the event.


CLS attendees swarm around to schedule sessions for the first day of the conference!

Community managers are diverse

Co-located with OSCON, CLS draws leading community professionals from major open source projects. While the event is skewed towards open source communities, the diversity of attendees at CLS never ceases to amaze me. People come from around the world to share their experiences working on open source projects, managing user groups, sheparding online forums, and more. In addition to the open source crowd, there were participants from major technology companies such as Google, Oracle, and Adobe, community managers at early stage startups, academics, local Portlanders, and even someone building a live/work space in San Francisco.


CLS group photo!

Community management as a profession

In the past few years, community management has emerged as an inter-disciplinary profession. CLS is a rare opportunity for me to connect with other lots of other people who do what I do and share best practices in a variety of areas. I left CLS inspired by many great ideas about metrics, forum management, cultivating speakers, and creating better online events (as well as a second copy of The Art of Community).

CLS wiki

During each CLS session, we appointed someone to take notes on the conversation. We generated an amazing body of knowledge on the CLS wiki, so if you couldn’t attend this year, you can still access information on the topics discussed. Jono Bacon also wrote a great summary of the event on his blog, and Andy Oram of O’Reilly wrote a detailed post on the CLS session on social networks. In the coming weeks, I hope to write some more detailed posts on some specific CLS sessions that I found the most informative.

Interviews with community managers

During CLS, the Kaltura community team interviewed several attendeess about their experiences at the event. I was honored to be featured alongside Jono Bacon (the founder of CLS), Angie Byron of Acquia, my colleague Adam, and many other prominent members of the CLS community. The interviews are available on the Kaltura blog.

My OSCON talk

At OSCON, I gave a talk on scaling community, a presentation similar to the one I gave at Open Source Bridge. In addition to the two blog posts I wrote leading up to OS Bridge on this topic, my slides are posted on SpeakerDeck and the kind folks at Stoic Security and Compliance wrote a summary of my talk on their blog. One of the great things about attending CLS before presenting at OSCON was having so many community managers attend my talk, ask questions, and provide feedback. It made the experience a lot more fun.

Jul 23 2012
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Events, Fun

Staying healthy while on the road

Staying healthy can be a major challenge when you are in a role with lots of travel. Long flights leave your muscles stiff. Conferences can turn into week-long binge drinking and eating sessions. Jet lag can turn your sleeping and eating patterns topsy turvy.

Recently, I’ve noticed an awesome trend at conferences: organizers are recognizing that we need to take care of ourselves while we’re at these events. Open Source Bridge offered a yoga class and had a massage therapist on site for short massages. (After getting off a 5-hour flight, a 10-minute neck rub was extremely beneficial.) OSCON hosted its first 5k run at the event, and in a blog post leading up to the event, provided several suggestions for ways to stay healthy during the conference.

334-OSCON-2012

The starting line at the OSCON 5k!

These types of activities are a great start, but staying healthy at conferences requires more effort. Here are some of the ways I try to stay in good health while on the road:

  1. Walk everywhere. Walking is the best way to explore a new city, and it’s excellent exercise. I use a Fitbit to track steps and set a daily goal for activity. If you’re doing lots of networking meetings, try scheduling a walk around town rather than meeting for a drink.
  2. Drink lots of fluids. And by fluids I mean water, not beer! Planes often dehydrate me, and walking an expo hall I often forget to stay hydrated. Make a conscious effort to drink water during the whole trip. For example, set a rule that for every session you attend that you have to have a glass a water. Try to limit your consumption to one beer per day.
  3. Watch your eating habits. Find a way to break out of the conference catering, airport food, and take-out routine. Instead of eating in the dining hall, try walking to a nearby restaurant with healthier options.
  4. Book hotels with a gym. They tend to be a little more expensive, but it’s usually cheaper than a temporary gym membership (and more convenient).
  5. Bend and fold. I have a super thin travel yoga mat from Manduka that I stick in my bag. Even 15 minutes of yoga in a hotel room floor can bring enormous benefits, especially after a long flight. If you don’t want to lug a yoga mat, you can use a towel or YogaPaws.
  6. Encourage conference organizers to offer healthy activities. Next year, O’Reilly plans to offer another 5k at OSCON, and I’m working with @PDXYogini and @VanRiper to get some yoga classes on the schedule as well.

I’ll have more updates from Community Leadership Summit and OSCON over the next week or two!

Jul 01 2012
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Community, Events, Open Source, Presentations

Thoughts on Open Source Bridge

This week I attended Open Source Bridge, a completely community and volunteer run conference in Portland. Having attended many large corporate trade shows, OS Bridge felt incredibly refreshing. The diversity of the audience impressed me: in addition to open source developers I met project managers, designers, entrepreneurs, and even a lawyer. I also saw greater participation from women than I’ve seen at any other tech event. The schedule included technical sessions as well as presentations on culture, community, and business. Participants were encouraged to make notes and share knowledge on the sessions using the event wiki. The conference also included some fun perks, including excellent, locally catered food, a massage therapist on site, and a yoga class.

During the two days that I spent at the event, I attended several other fascinating talks. Here are some highlights from my favorite sessions.

Be Bold: An Origin Story

I arrived on Tuesday morning to attend Sumana’s keynote on being bold. Her inspiring talk covered her upbringing, her parents, and her interest in computers as a child. It included a great call to action about empowering young people to get involved in open source.

Text Lacks Empathy

I learned about the challenges of geek communication in Text Lacks Empathy, where Noirin Plunkett and Michael Schwern gave several practical suggestions for reducing miscommunications over email, forum discussions, and bug reports:

  • Perception is reality and by default, when we read factual text we assume the worst emotion
  • State your feelings or use emoticons
  • Geeks can lack tact so it’s always important to apply a little bit of tact in communications by default
  • Consider paraphrasing what the other person is saying to reduce confusion
  • Assume sincerity instead of sarcasm
  • IM is better than email, phone is better than IM, Skype/Video chat is better than phone, but in person communication is best
  • Use the passive voice: “Someone broke the build” implies accusation or blame, so consider “The build is broken.”
  • Start with the summary, then go to the detailed explaination

How We Went Remote

Immediately prior to Text Lacks Empathy, I attended a session from VM Brasseur on How We Went Remote. The challenges that the presenter discussed exemplified many of the concepts covered in Text Lacks Empathy. After discussing the benefits of building a remote team, including access to talent and reduced cost, VM gave some practical tips:

  • Being “in the office” is being logged into the team chat room
  • Documentation is critical! VM would open tickets for her team to update the docs so that it was included in their daily workflow.
  • Getting the team together in person a few times a year is important in order for the staff to gel

What We Talk About When We Talk About Project Management

On Wednesday, I participated in a fun and interactive session called What We Talk About When We Talk About Project Management. Presenter Amye Scavarda, a Drupal Project Manager from Acquia, clearly defined the role of a project manager. She then proceeded to pull up several job descriptions for project managers, demonstrating how a very specific skill set is becoming a catch-all for many companies. The group reviewed and debated the different job listings in a fun and lively discussion.

Scaling Community By Nurturing Leaders

I also presented on Wednesday, giving the presentation version of my recent blog posts on scaling community and why we should invest in community leaders. I posted my slides on SpeakerDeck and look forward to your feedback.

Thanks to everyone at OSB for an amazing and inspiring event. I look forward to next year’s conference, and hopefully I will see some of my new friends at OSCON in a few weeks!

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