DevFest CZ 2017 Summary
We started organizing DevFest in February according to the vision described in this article. The event is over now, so let’s see how it all worked out.
Prague
The move back to Prague was a good call. We had 500 attendees! 38% of attendees were not from Prague. The event sold out one day before the event. But it wasn’t easy for us because most of the tickets were sold in the last two weeks:
First day talks, second day workshops
On average, attendees rated the talks “great” in our feedback form. We are really proud of our selection of speakers. We also used tablets to collect feedback right after the sessions: the speaker with the lowest score reached an evaluation of “68% people loved his talk”, which is still pretty good. Three speakers had a flawless 100% score:
We will definitely invite them next year! See slides and watch recordings of all the talks.
Separation of talks and workshops also worked well, with 350 people registered for the workshops. Not all of them came, but we think the afterparty is to blame :) For next year, we are thinking about moving the workshops to Friday and keep the talks & afterparty on Saturday.
International event
We are proud that this worked out really well. English was the primary language of DevFest CZ and that attracted great speakers from 13 countries who felt welcome thanks to that. In total, we had 6.3% foreign attendees. Check out this map of where they came from:
Playfulness
We delivered on our promise of making our conference worth visiting even outside the lecture halls. Our AMOS AI took over the opening ceremony and then 255 attendees played the game throughout the whole day. We would like to thank our partner eMan for creating the Android and iOS apps. We included our partners in the game, which worked out well: the partners’ booths were mainly about fun and interaction, not hiring. Oh, and the #lamfie challenge was a fun twist. Congrats Rebecca, we hope you enjoyed the cake!
Google I/O spirit
We managed to bring some Google I/O fun to the afterparty. Just look at pictures from our attendees: ball pit, jenga, origami or domino. Somebody even sorted the balls by color!
Paid event
The ticket price helped bring the no-show rate down to 12%. But we wanted to make our event accessible for students and other underrepresented groups in tech. That was the reason we introduced company-funded tickets; companies help the community by covering the discounted tickets. In total, 76 company-funded tickets were sold and they supported 127 Student/Diversity tickets. Our budget ended up in positive numbers. All the surplus from the event will go to GUG.cz non-profit organization and will be used for our future events. Check out how our incomes and expenses were divided:
Community
The community spirit is hard to describe, just look at these 190 tweets from our attendees. We value the inclusion of underrepresented groups in tech such as women in our community. And thanks to our focus, we had 12% female attendees this year. It’s double compared to the previous year.
We would also like to help other communities to organize similar conferences. That’s why we are open-sourcing everything we produced for our event: the website, Android+iOS app, old-school interface of AMOS, script for converting CfP data to schedule on the web and script for preparing badges from ti.to data. All of this is built using cool technologies like Firebase, Kotlin, Progressive Web Apps and more, check it out!
The whole conference was only possible by volunteer work of organizers from GUG.cz. We had 17 core and support organizers and 15 more helped us on day D. Thanks everyone for your work!
All photos: Facebook | Google Photos
DevFest CZ 2018
Attendees rated our event “great” on average in our feedback form. 67% of attendees will use some knowledge from DevFest CZ in their work/projects. 63% of people think that our event was better than other/previous DevFests. And most importantly, 86% of attendees plan to attend next year.
We know not everything was ideal (lunch queue, anyone?). We take your feedback seriously and we would like to make the next DevFest CZ even better. We met with core organizers and analyzed your feedback. The result are these concrete ideas what we will do differently or keep doing (with priorities).
So stay tuned for the next year!
