Imagine you have a crazy idea of gathering all BeerJS communities in a form of non-official conference at a cool place, with 20+ international speakers and unlimited beer with $20 ticket? Sounds like this mission is impossible? Nope, we did it. And we did it well.
On June 30th we hosted BeerJS Summit Minsk. After receiving great feedback from almost 30 speakers and 150+ attendees, I’ve decided to give some details about this event as an organizer.
So the main features of this so called conference are kinda unique:
- Squeeze time of the talk to 5–7 minutes. Yep, sounds ridiculous, but it’s crucial to have this limit — just let the audience understand the main idea of the talk.
- Combine 4–6 talks into one bundle related to the one topic (JS, Soft Skills, Fails and Life Lessons, and so on) with panel discussion/Q&A session after each block.
- One speaker from this bundle becomes a moderator for the next bundle of talks.
- After each bundle there is short break, after 2 bundles — long break.
- No recording of the talks — 18+ slides, no censorship, however no harrasment slides.
- Unlimited free beer at the event (some craft beers weren’t free actually) with two pizza breaks.
- Great DJ set from one of the speakers at the after-party.
- And one more thing about the ads — we had none. It was just a community event — so we decided to spread the word across different communities in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Germany and so on. And it actually worked, and this particular fact is one of the most great thing about it. Even there were folks from different cities and countries, the whole vibe of this event was as if we were all big family :)
This new form of light conference sounds very promising, and I hope to host the next BeerJS Summit quite soon.
