DevParty 2020 by GDG Russia

On June 27, GDG leads from Russia held the first large-scale event together with 46 speakers split into 3 tracks. The preparation for this event took about a month.

26 GDG leads from 18 chapters in Russia and Belarus participated in the DevParty organization. Within one month, amazing speakers from 10 countries, including GDEs (Google Developer Experts) in all areas: Web, Mobile, and Machine Learning, completed our CFPs.

Among the speakers were employees of the largest companies such as Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Lyft, JetBrains, JFrog, Wrike, Yahoo.

Main idea and goals of DevParty Russia

We all know that a large number of conferences around the world have been canceled or moved online. GDG Russia decided to make a real 15-hour online marathon on YouTube with 3 tracks. No one in Russia has done anything like this before us. Our main idea was to hold a big celebration, to share knowledge, updates, and discuss all of this while staying home.

An additional goal that we set for ourselves was to show the coverage of the GDG chapters. The event started at midday in Vladivostok (GMT+10), our most eastern GDG chapter in Russia, rolled over the entire country from east to west, and was finished at 7 pm by GDG Kaliningrad (GMT +2), the most western city.

Agenda with speakers from 10 countries:

DevParty Russia connected speakers from different cities of Russia and 9 other countries: the US, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Czechia, Japan, Luxembourg, and Belarus, but they all speak Russian!

We have put together a great agenda covering topics such as Android, Flutter, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, Firebase, Web Vitals, and ending with: TensorFlow.js, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning, Transformers, and NLP.

Statistics after DevParty Russia:

• 26 organizers involved in the process;
• support from 34 GDG chapters from Russia + 1 GDG chapter from Belarus;
• 46 speakers from 10 countries;
• 17 moderators for talks;
• 3 tracks.

Statistics from YouTube:

• Nearly 12,000 views;
• Nearly 2,000 watch time (hours);
• Over 3800 unique viewers;
• Over 1000 comments added (including live comments during broadcasts);
• Over 800 likes.

Thanks to this, more than 500 people subscribed to our new channel, which made us very happy! 🎉

Some technical details:

We used Tilda (tilda.cc) for creating our conference site.

We used StreamYard (streamyard.com) for streaming.

We broadcasted on our brand new YouTube channel GDG Russia:
youtube.com/channel/UCxKXx-eVWNib87Wst7nv_KQ.

As I mentioned before, we divided our program into 3 tracks: Mobile, Cloud, and Web. We used different streams for every talk so we had 3 playlists of 15 videos each before the conference.

Pros of this approach:

• Participants could subscribe to interesting talks in advance;
• During the conference, each attendee could quickly move between talks;
• After the conference, the talks were available immediately in separate videos.

Almost all the talks had a high level of engagement from the audience

We started a Telegram chat as the main communication channel for our speakers and viewers. People could continue their discussions with the speakers in the chat after talks as we can do at an offline conference.

Promotion of the event:

We created general GDG Russia pages on social networks: VK, Facebook, and Telegram-channel. It allowed us to write about the event and then share the posts in all available local GDG chapters channels. We also attracted info-partners and invited participants from other professional communities in Russia who helped us to tell people about the conference.

What we can be most proud of after DevParty Russia:

• The first event we did together with 34 GDG chapters from all over Russia + GDG Minsk from Belarus.
• We have a YouTube channel for common activities along with common social networks under the brand name GDG Russia.
• We got to know each other better since GDG is not just a team of organizers, it is a family and we now want to see each other more often and do more cool events together.

Tips and Tricks for organizers in other countries:

• A separate broadcast for each talk. We liked this approach and will use it for DevFest this year.
• Consider having breaks: 15 hours in a row is tough work both for organizers and attendees.
• Do test runs with moderators. Not everyone has participated in this role before and live broadcasts are different from offline events 😉
• Service for broadcasting StreamYard (streamyard.com) proved to be very good but there is no way to stream in 1080p resolution.

Wrapping up:

Even though the DevParty Russia 2020 online conference was prepared in just 1 month, and before that we had not held events together, speakers and participants praised the excellent organization of the conference!

It was an unforgettable experience for each of us. It also worked for us as a team-building activity since we worked all together for a month to make this conference happen.

Huge thanks to our amazing Ekaterina Vinnichenko, Community Manager for Russia, for keeping the entire online conference under control and coordinating the actions of a large team of 26 organizers and 46 speakers!

If you are still thinking about whether to host DevParty in your country or not, our answer is: Definitely YES, you will like it! We liked it so much that we want to hold more events like this and have already begun to prepare for one big DevFest this year.

Now we want to make a bigger event and hold DevFest for Russian-speaking developers. If you want to join us, please write to Ekaterina Vinnichenko (facebook.com/vinnichenko.ekaterina).

Site for DevParty Russia 2020: gdg-russia.com/devparty2020

Links to playlists from DevParty Russia 2020:

Mobile track: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGlZ_ld11os_JyZ6xVAWEZ-rnxrLjrGH5

Web track: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGlZ_ld11os-nnB5CG_p6brIUWMGXU5Tr

Cloud track: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGlZ_ld11os8QYBOSM8KU3INh244iFXKK

P.S. All talks were in Russian.