Our first Flutter Conf Latam event 💙 (FCL-2023)
A year ago, we began dreaming about organizing an event to bring our beloved Flutter community in Latin America together. In this article, I want to answer the following questions: What motivated us to develop it? What does it involve to organize an event like FCL? How did it go? What did we learn? What are our expectations?
The right motivation leads to the right results.
Organizing our first event was quite a challenge. We had many questions. Will people be motivated to attend? Will anyone be encouraged to sponsor us? Where will we hold the event? Will we have enough volunteers for all the work? Why take on such a heavy burden?
After all, we had many local communities throughout Latin America. But we had yet to manage to see ourselves as a regional community. Together, we had a lot of love stored up because, during the pandemic, we gave virtual talks. We knew each other’s faces and voices, but we hadn’t had the opportunity to meet in person all those who, in the virtual world, seek to increase our knowledge and help others improve in Flutter.
Flutter has been characterized by a community that likes to share knowledge and solutions with its peers, so unsurprisingly, we have many meetups around this technology in our region. Additionally, more and more companies are using Flutter for their solutions. Universities have started teaching workshops and even development courses in this technology.
Therefore, as event organizers, we saw a genuine opportunity to unite Latin America with its excellent developers, universities, and companies. We wanted an event that would allow people from all over the world who are motivated by the same reason, our passion for Flutter, to get to know each other. We were excited to make this event come true.
Seeing the attendees’ happiness and everything we accomplished, we are sure there is no better motivation than bringing together our beloved Latam community.
Some challenges we faced before the event
Organizing an event certainly has its challenges, but believe me, we need to learn about everything behind it. Let’s see some of them :
Choosing the location and venue
Selecting a location in beautiful Latin America was challenging, as many places seemed like excellent candidates. In response to this, we consulted the community to find out:
On this occasion, the community chose Colombia as the event location. Now, we had to find a place that would open its doors to us in this country.
Bancolombia offered us its facilities, becoming our chosen venue for our first FCL.
Finding sponsors
Behind an event, there are many expenses, such as food, swag, stands, hotel accommodation for speakers, advertising, lithography, and a long list of expenses. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges we had was to cover them. One way is through institution sponsorship, which was a challenge for us as it was our first FCL event.
However, to our pleasant surprise, the event was well received, and we began to see sponsors gradually increasing. Even a few weeks before the event, sponsors continued to appear, which only reduced our concerns about expenses.
We are truly grateful to all our sponsors for believing in this dream.
Finding speakers
Another challenge we thought we would have was finding high-level speakers interested in FCL. To our surprise, after the Call For Papers (CFP) ended, we had more than 230 proposals for exciting topics for the community. Therefore, a selection team was formed, and after several weeks, we chose our speakers. Additionally, we were joined by 13 Flutter GDEs from all over the world. Some traveled for more than a day to join us, and we are truly grateful to them. We also had GDEs from other technologies, such as Firebase.
Prepare the website
A Flutter event without a good website developed with this beautiful technology would be a shame. Among our team of organizers, we had some geniuses creating our website, which deserves a talk and article describing all the elements we had there. From there, we had ticket sales, sponsorship packages, promotion of our partner communities, our speakers, and even the agenda for the entire event. It was undoubtedly a great tool to ensure that everything went smoothly.
Remember to add it to your favorite sites: https://flutterconflatam.dev/.
Finding a Colombian Sign Language (LSC) interpretation team
In our event, we had an attendee who was deaf (see terminology), so he couldn’t attend and enjoy the event without taking action. The attendee, Andres García, wrote to us to ask if it would be possible to have interpretation services. It was a challenge because we had conferences in English and Spanish on technology topics. We would increase our costs if we needed to include the interpretation service. But we felt that it was a possibility that we should consider, so after researching several companies, we found a suitable one for the job. Interestingly, it is necessary to have at least two interpreters to take turns between talks by track.
Some new signs were needed for the event to convey information better. The word Flutter did not have an established sign language sign, so the deaf attendee created signs for this and other words, which were later adopted by the interpretation team. Some added signs are front-end, Back-end, App, Widget, Cloud, and UI.
We are genuinely grateful to Andres and the interpretation team. We believe that all technology events must consider inclusion whenever possible to make information accessible to everyone.
The days leading up to the event
At this point, behind an event, no matter how much you prepare in advance, there is always a lot of work to be done in the days leading up to it.
The entire team of organizers worked tirelessly until the last moment to provide the best possible experience to all attendees. Let me tell you that the previous three days before the event, we enjoyed very few hours of sleep (sometimes 2 hours). But it was worth every second.
Finally, we were ready to start our first FCL.
How did it go?
Finally, it was October 25, 2023, a historic day for us as a community, as we could finally see each other together in Latam. In total, we had visitors from 23 countries, not only from Latin America but also worldwide.
We were happy to receive our 365 attendees, 29 staff members, and over 40 speakers. The stands, the talks, everything was great.
Let’s talk about some of the highlights of these days:
Visit to the stands.
Attendees could test their Flutter knowledge at the stands or play games.
For example, at the FCL stand, they could play Flappy Dash, and the person who reached one minute would win a Dash 🤣 (only two people won).
At the VGV space, attendees could play the famous pinball, and if they were in the top 3 scores, they would receive a trophy.
At the Invertase stand, a technical challenge was to win great prizes such as swag or technology products.
Without a doubt, visiting each of the spaces was an opportunity to take home good memories and, of course, swag 🤯.
GDE Panel in English and Spanish
As mentioned earlier, we had the opportunity to have a good number of GDEs at the event, so we took the opportunity to hold a panel in both English and Spanish:
The audience had questions about Flutter Web, Flutter in video games, what motivated us to become GDEs, state management, and criteria for choosing Flutter in enterprise projects, among other questions. Interestingly, we were the event with the most GDE participation to date.
Workshops
The workshops were great because the topics covered all levels, and the participation of the attendees was outstanding.
One of the challenges for the attendees was a Riverpod workshop where the top 4 places received prizes:
As a curious fact, among the first four places was Andrés, who is deaf and for whom we transmitted the event in Colombian Sign Language (LSC). Another curious fact is that Fabián was the one who designed these beautiful awards:
The talks
The talks showed varied topics in English and Spanish. The attendees wanted to attend all of them and even constantly asked if we would have the sessions recorded.
In some talks, we gave away Dashes to those who answered questions correctly. It was wild 🤣.
Another positive point is the excellent participation of women in our talks:
We are happy to see how their participation in technology increases every day.
The social part and networking.
During and at the end of the event, many people who were only online acquaintances became friends. Many also took the opportunity to approach the GDEs to ask them questions regarding topics related to Flutter.
Others who dreamed of meeting companies to be able to offer their services also managed to meet this expectation since many of the sponsors allowed them to register for job offers.
In addition, companies that wanted to meet skilled developers and other leading companies in the industry achieved this point.
Official Flutter Website Translated into Spanish
Dorian Hidalgo dedicated his time to translating the main Flutter website for three months into Spanish. The link to the translated website is https://esflutter.dev/. We greatly appreciate Dorian and his collaborators for their hard work. These efforts help overcome the barriers that language differences can sometimes create.
Dorian has also received support from Jay Chang and Khanh Nguyen. If you wish to join the translation team, you can contact Dorian via email at dorian.hidalgo@gmail.com. There is still documentation to be translated, so we appreciate the support of all volunteers.
Tasting the coffee from our region
This topic has nothing to do with Flutter, but we consider it successful. Many people had the opportunity to taste Colombian coffee. We had an open bar where everyone interested could try different coffee-based drinks in various presentations. Expert baristas prepared the coffee.
People from outside of Latam fell in love with our land.
We also want to highlight that our visitors from outside of Latin America fell in love with these lands. They visited and got to know part of this beautiful place.
We hope they leave with good memories and a desire to visit us again.
Lessons learned
We have undoubtedly learned many lessons, but we would like to highlight the following:
- It is essential to notify the agenda of event speakers in advance.
- A local sign language interpretation team can open doors for Deaf people to access the content.
- The Latam community has a lot of love to give, and we are sure they will continue supporting future events.
- We have learned how to manage an international event, and we hope to bring improvements for the entire audience in the next one.
- Although the primary language of the event is Spanish, the talks and stands presented in English had excellent participation so that we could maintain a bilingual environment.
- It is good to have topics at all levels of language proficiency, as we had attendees who were getting to know Flutter and experts in the technology.
These and other learnings will help us improve as an organizing team for future events.
Expectations
As the organizing team of FCL:
- we want to host events like this in the future, making it the first of many.
- We also want to keep the cost as low as possible so that tickets remain accessible.
- We want to provide sign language interpretation services.
- We aim to improve the event experience and increase our impact on the Flutter community.
But above all, our desire is for everyone to leave with a smile, having gained many learnings and new friends.
Big hugs, and see you at the next FCL 💙🥳.
