DevFest Live by Google Developer Group Budapest
Here is how we hosted a virtual Developer’s Conference.
Exactly 1.5 years ago we started planning our next event unaware of what was waiting for us. Rescheduling, pandemic, going virtual, technical issues and finally we made it happen on June 3rd, 2021.
I have been organizing and attending events for years, but this one right here was a special one for me for many reasons. To begin with, DevFest Live was going to be one of the biggest ones we would organize with Zsigmond, GDG Budapest Co-Organizer. Second, we were going to have multiple tracks bringing together the top tech voices from all around the world.
It was not an easy journey for us as organizers because, with the pandemic, everything had to be transferred to the virtual world and we had to make sure that the audience will have a smooth experience online. We had our ‘Call for Paper’ (CFP) form open for a while, which resulted in receiving more than 260 applications! However, we had to review each one of them in detail and choose the speakers according to the guideline of our conference. After weeks of reviewing we finalized the applications and chose 25 speakers who joined us from various countries (the beauty of virtual events!).
Now that one year has passed over the pandemic, we felt like people have lost their motivation to join “Live” events on different platforms. Moreover, internet connection has been becoming an issue for most as everyone has a different speed or restrictions. When there is a break, the audience gets impatient and wants immediate action. So all of this becomes a challenge to host live events. However, we also wanted for people to interact and to reach out to the speakers as though they would in-person events. To make this conference more enjoyable for the audience we had to come up with a different approach. Here is how we did it:
With 25 speakers, clearly, we weren’t going to have one long day of the conference because people would get exhausted in front of their computers. So we categorized the topics and created 5 different stages with 4-5 speakers per stage (tracks). We asked all our speakers to send a pre-recorded video of their presentation. This method saved everyone from any live technical issues. It also saved time for the speakers and avoided any internet breaks in between their talks. We even got our wonderful host Stephanie Wong, Sr. Developer Advocate at Google and Award-winning speaker, to prepare her talks ahead. Once we had all the videos, Zsigmond spent hours and days putting the recordings together. I think this must have been the most challenging part because a lot of editing and rendering had to be done — which took a couple of hours. In the final phase, our audience would gather on the Spatial Chat platform to watch the streaming presentations.
Let’s get into the final stage of the event. We used the Spatial Chat platform to create 5 stages, a lounge, and a networking room. Once the videos started streaming, participants could switch between stages to listen to the topics they wanted. While listening to the speakers, they could also use the chat, make comments, network and ask questions to the speakers during the talk because guess what — they joined us for networking sessions!
Now let’s also hear from Zsigmond, GDG Budapest & WTM Budapest Co-Organizer, and DevFest Lead. Here is what Zsigmond has to say about the whole event:
What was the most challenging part?
Organizing an online event with 25 speakers and 5 parallel tracks is challenging. You need to use the right tools and methods to do all the work efficiently.
Building up and managing the team was the biggest challenge in the whole event. Fortunately, we managed to recruit a team of enthusiastic community organizers who did their best to make this event successful.
Our CfP was open for a long time, so we have received hundreds of great proposals. Selecting the speakers was a very tough job, done by our content team. We have used multiple factors to select only the best proposals.
Once the selection was done, communication with the speakers was also a great challenge. Although some speakers confirmed their attendance, but they didn’t deliver their talks in the end. In some cases the communication was cumbersome. You need to be strict in this to avoid any risks.
To avoid technical issues, we decided to stream pre-recorded talks. One would never consider how difficult it is to edit all the content, convert them to the right format and schedule everything to the right time.
We wanted to set up the streams in advance, end to end, but it turned out that the software we have used to edit the sessions was not able to render them without any problems.
Working with tens of gigabytes of data is not an easy task. It takes a while even to copy such a huge amount of data locally, not to mention conversion or uploading video files to the cloud.
Besides this, it turned out that streaming 5 parallel tracks live in 720p is way beyond the capacity of a home broadband Internet connection, so we had to find a professional streaming solution for this that was able to store the content in the cloud and handle scheduling.
What did you like the most?
We are honored to work together with such great speakers. They did a great job delivering top-quality talks. We are thankful for all the effort they put into their sessions.
It’s been a great honor that Sr Developer Advocate Stephanie Wong from Google accepted our invitation for hosting the show. She was very supportive from the beginning and we have learned a lot from her.
I must admit that working with Stephanie was one of the best experiences I ever had since I have been a GDG organizer.
There was a special session that opened DevFest Live. We have invited digital artists 2xAA (Sam Wray) NERDDISCO (Tim Pietrusky) to do a live performance at the event. They did a hell of a good performance and the technical side of the setup they use for the music and the visuals turned out to be super exciting.
Like I mentioned in the beginning, this conference was very special for me because of all the challenges we faced and the efforts we put into organizing the conference to make it an enjoyable experience for our audience. While we were planning an in-person conference, transitioning into the virtual world and getting the same motivated participants to join was not easy. Despite all these challenges, we pulled it through at a high level without any technical issues. There is always room for improvement. Big THANKS to everyone who was with us on this journey!
This was our first big online developer conference and definitely not last. We had a long discussion after our conference and along with the feedback of participants and speakers we reflected on how to improve it for the next year. This means we cannot wait to see you all at the 2022 DevFest Live conference!
For those of you who missed the conference but would like to learn more about topics such as Kotlin, Cloud-Native, building IoTshirt (super cool), building a Voice-Driven Web Application, Storytelling using VR, Blockchain on Flutter, and more then don’t forget to visit our YouTube channel and subscribe for the upcoming events.
Stay creative and keep inspiring!
