Virtual Events — First Take Aways

Lessons learned by attending a virtual conference and creating a virtual event

Teaser for the first virtual event of the GDG Nuremberg

As a organizer of local meetups since 3.5 years I’ve gained a lot experience in hosting local events. Together with co-organizer Marco Fuhrich the GDG Nuremberg, Germany has hosted more than 40 events until now. But since meeting in person is currently not possible right due to Covid-19 and we still wanted to keep the community running we decided to create our first virtual event. In addition to that, I recently attended my first virtual conference, Virtual Android Makers and was also able to learn what is important for an attendee of such an online event. I’d like to share my learnings with you in this article from both perspectives:

Pros

Hosting an online event means hosting a world-wide event which is great considering that you also have a much larger pool of professional speakers to choose from and a way bigger audience to stream to . So for our developer group usually having around 5–30 attendees per event having suddenly 112 attendees was a huge win. Our attendees came from Nigeria, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Saudi-Arabia, USA, Italy, Ukraine, Poland and of course Germany. So we had a way more diverse audience than during a local event.

Cons

You don’t meet in person so you have to find ways to keep this event still interesting for all the attendees. You’ll probably have to find a different format than you used to have for hosting local events.

People cannot meet in person so find ways to make the event interactive and give speakers and attendees the chance to connect. Finding the correct tools for that is something you have to consider.

Another thing at least to consider is that there is a way higher chance of your event to fail due to technical issues. So the right technical setup is crucial and testing it as well.

Technical setup

We’ve been recommended various setups including usage of streamyard, virtualconference, streaming via YouTube Live and the usage of Zoom. Android Makers used the virtualconference platform which is a paid service and for a conference with nearly 700 attendees probably the right solution. From my own experience as an attendee it was ok, not perfect. There were issues with multispeaker streaming, often bad streaming quality in the beginning without any lags and then better image quality with lags later. So I guess it’s simply a challenge of finding the right balance between those two extremes and not a platform issue.

Using a video conference service for 112 attendees is possible, but was nothing we really wanted. Given that video conferences with a few speakers can already be noisy and prone to echoes or unmuted microphones as well as streaming quality issues, we chose to create a video conference for speakers and organizers only and stream dedicated contents from that to the audience.

The setup we chose therefore was Skype and Twitch which has also been sucessfully used by GDG Cloud Munich. Skype offers Network Device Interface (NDI) support which can then be streamed to Twitch via the Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). Marco Fuhrich, co-organizer of the GDG Nuremberg did the heavy lifting for this setup and was also keeping an eye on the setup during the meetup. This was awesome work, Marco. Check out his article which goes more into the technical details of the setup.

One of the biggest advantages of the mentioned setup is that the stream can be designed: you can create scenes and transitions, show speakers and their slides side-by-side and — well you can completely freak out. It’s highly customizable.

For the audience interaction we used the Twitch chat and Slido as Q & A tool.

Learnings Speakers

While attending Android Makers I realized a few things speakers really have to pay attention to:

• Don’t use animations in slides as the stream may be laggy and the animation therefore as well
• Keep an eye on the chat to stay connected with your listeners and to get immediate feedback. This applies as well to organizers.
• Try to look at Q & A more often if you also want to answer questions during the talk. It’s easy to oversee questions when you don’t see any raised hands in front of you
• Think twice about high enough contrast in your slides as it’s even more important on a pixelated stream to have at least a good contrast
• Ensure the content is big enough on the slides as the stream may be pixelated
• Provide slides before the talk so that attendees with technical issues can still follow the slides while listening to your audio
• Definitely use headphones to prevent echoes — if you hear the echo and you don’t wear headphones most probably you are the problem
• Don’t feel obliged to sit during the talk. You usually stand on a stage and are able to move around. This is how you learned speaking.

Learnings Attendees

As an attendee of a virtual conference I realized the following things:

• It was a good experience to have a dedicated Q & A tool with voting for questions during the talk as you could immediately note questions (also anonymously) and vote up others which didn’t come to your mind
• Having everything streamed and therefore also recorded gives you the freedom to drink a coffee in between or do some sports and come back to the talk later or watch a talk when you realized the current live talk you were listening to was not your thing.
• Switching talks is easy and though I never had a big problem leaving the room during local conference talks, switching digitally is way easier and not as impolite :-)
• Using the chat and having the speakers listen to what you say gave you the impression to be more connected and not alone in front of your computer.
• Having a dedicated tool (Slack Channel) to give feedback to technical issues was great.
• I very often attended conferences with colleagues, now former colleagues and friends, so this time we chose to meet via Jitsi and talk during the conference, coordinate which talk we attended, recommend recorded talks and exchange jokes. This was better than nothing but definitely not the same as meeting in person. Miss you guys and also to meet people you know by chance on conferences.
• I usually vote for conference talks but sitting already in front of your computer makes it way easier to do that than using the smartphone during a local conference.
• Doing sketchnotes during the online talks or writing down the ideas on real paper provides some variety to simply sitting the whole day in front of your computer and starring into the screen.

Learnings organizer

• An international audience is awesome. It’s so motivating to stream your content world-wide. Our event consisted of 43 % German participants and the rest was from other countries from all over the world.
• The no-show-rate was actually smaller than with local events. We had 112 RSVPs to 94 unique attendees.
• People didn’t watch the whole stream. Though 94 people attended the event, the number of people actually watching the stream was between 24 and 44.
• If you use Twitch be aware that only registered users can chat with you which is a drawback to consider.
• If you use Twitch also be aware that the stream and therefore as well the chat responses are delayed by some seconds, in our case around 3 seconds, which is weird in the beginning if you want to communicate with the audience.
• Having different people manage different topics is something you should definitely do (Social Media, Technical Setup, Moderation) to get not overwhelmed with work during the event. You can’t manage this alone at least not with the our recommended setup.
• If possible provide slides to the attendees already before the talks.
• Make sure speakers use headphones to prevent echoes.
• Provide the talks also on Youtube afterwards to give attendees from other time zones the possibility to watch the event (if you use Twitch the event can be watched there again as well).
• Make sure to post your event on various international platforms like LinkedIn, the different Slack Channels (technology specific or organizer-specific), Facebook if you like and activate your international friends and contacts.
• Consider time differences with speakers and attendees and choose the best time for all.
• Although you tested everything before the event prepare for the worst during the event. 3 minutes before the actual start, our streaming computer just froze and we had to restart it.
• The audience was not interested in a video call after the event to replace the networking session — this doesn’t seem to work.

So hosting online events is definitely great , especially for smaller meetups and technical user groups. They can get more attendees and good speakers than with local events and this again can leverage your local community and your reputation as well.

And bringing the international part up again, streaming your content to the world reminds us that we are one species and that there are no borders anywhere except in our heads. Let me finish with the famous quote by John Perry Barlow from the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

I know this quotation is old but what’s still true about it: We are all just one big community. Thank you for listening!