How we organized DevFest 2021 in Spain — activities, streaming techniques and the unique joy of seeing each other again
Andreu Ibanez, GDG Spain
Some people would call me crazy — I’ve decided to directly organize not one but three DevFest events this season! The task would be difficult on it’s own, but the ongoing pandemic made it even tougher to put together. Luckily people who know me never doubted I could pull through — thanks to tremendous help from my amazing community of course.
This year I thought it was especially important to feature not only technology, but also participants’ feelings and emotions — after all, community is so much more than just a bunch of tech aficionados.
For GDG Lleida DevFest, the first one that we hosted on October 16th, we joined forces with a local WTM group; most of the members of the group are also GDG leads. Initially, we were planning on hosting some of the presentations about technology the traditional way — welcoming speakers and a small audience as well as providing live streaming. But as we were organizing this in August people were still uncomfortable with the idea of going places to give a short 30 minutes talk, so we decided to go online in the morning. All in all, we were able to stream 4+4 presentations about Android, Google GEO, Tensorflow, Play Store, and the groups and activities. That part is available on my Youtube channel.
And for a Community Afternoon, we thought about doing something special and fun for the people who gathered in person. We chose a main theme that would feature both our local environment and ecology. We’d decided to go with botanics. Lleida city is situated on a very large plane that’s the 2nd largest fruit grower zone in Spain. It produces a billion kilograms of apples, pears and peaches each year! We held a 4-hour session that included 4 talks about local flora, initiatives, projects, companies doing business in this agricultural region, one big workshop with WTM Zaragoza lead Cynthia Gálvez that focused on developing AR filters like at the photo.
Another incredible workshop called Floridia was hosted by Paquita, WTM Lleida lead, who told us all about pressing flowers and creating your own decorative designs- a fun, super relaxing activity that allows you to slow down, be mindful and dive into nature.
During this workshop all the 40 attendees had a chance to develop a botanical composition by themselves, learning the different techniques and the story behind it. Everyone took a lovely Floridia kit back home — we wanted folks to keep creating and finding that inner peace whenever they needed to.
Someone even developed a nice, framed WTM logo using leaves and flowers:
The afternoon track was a blast, with all the attendees expressing vividly their thanks for the event, the workshops. Everyone said how they felt appreciated and included.
All the afternoon community sessions are also available on Youtube.
Before the GDG Spain DevFest, which would have been the first nationwide event held live, we learned that people had different feelings about joining in person. Some groups across Spain remained active during the pandemic and declared they wanted to join our initiative, but others didn’t — and that’s ok, people are coping with the situation in their own way. Nonetheless, we wanted to make an effort towards reviving our communities.
Finding a venue was a bit challenging this year. It took me and 3 other leads 3 whole months! It’s usually much easier than that in Madrid because of the Google Campus, a magnificent venue always ready to host us (and whoever wants to organize an event), but due to COVID-19 restrictions, it’s still not available. So we contacted universities, companies and plenty of other places, looking for a medium-sized conference space (we thought that no more than 75 people would attend in person).Finally, after extensive research, we came across a company, Sngular, that has a small but nice venue with a rich multimedia equipment on site. After they’d accepted our request, we could properly announce the DevFest. At last!
After announcing a Call for Papers on GDG Spain Slack , we had a dozen leads willing to come to Madrid and give a speech.
We chose 9 people for the morning opening session and the rest were scheduled to lead afternoon sessions. The afternoon session will not be available for the public, but only for all the GDG Spain leads (300 on our Slack) through a Meet call.
Finally only seven leads joined us via Meet, but more people decided to appear in person — initially we thought we’d only get to greet 19 leads, but the number rose to 25 in the afternoon and 35 for a surprise dinner party in a 144-year old local restaurant, Casa Mingo in Madrid.
The event was held on Saturday, November 6th. All the morning presentations are available here. Everyone who joined us for the morning sessions (GDG lead, community members and external guests) were happy with the event. They enjoyed seeing each other again, sharing recent activities and the new ones coming. It was like restarting the groups — a powerful, amazing experience we’ll all remember for a long time.
Still ahead is DevFest XR, our sixth edition of a DevFest focused on so-called Mixed Realities, hotter than ever with the trending topic of the Metaverse spread by the big corporations. It will be held in Madrid on Saturday, December 4th. We expect a small audience due to COVID-19 restrictions, but all the presentations will be streamed. This way we can reach a few thousand developers interested in the event, not just in Spain, but around the world!
We’re planning to host 8 technical presentations in the morning as well as a round table session about the XR world status. For the afternoon, we’ve scheduled different community sessions available for anyone, locally or remotely. Folks will be able to join those sessions with a VR headset. We’re also planning another round table-like session, this time developed in AltspaceVR, one of the so-called Metaverse engines. The solution was already featured a few times in our XR Devfest Podcast. Check out the hashtag #XRDevFest2021 for some freaky images of people doing the first face to face event, and having a VR headset instead of masked faces!
Last but not least I’d like to add a few words on the solution we developed for streaming the content during face-to-face events. The first thing is that the system has to be based on Broadcast hardware and not a PC, because PCs, as powerful as the ones we have at home for running OBS-based streams, are not portables… The equipment needs to be portable, have a couple of cameras and a minimal sound system.
After weeks of research we finally went for an Atem Mini Pro from BlackMagic, an Australian broadcast company that has created an offering available for anyone, regardless of the budget. But you know, things may look easy on paper, but the reality is different. After a few weeks of trying various solutions, we ended up with many cables and a fully-transportable set we can carry around in a suitcase.
Here you can see the system in action at the DevFest Lleida, with three cameras and several laptops to run it.
Luckily, the Sngular venue we chose to host our events in Madrid had a very good broadcast system on-site, so we didn’t really need to use our equipment, but we had it as a backup just in case. And we’re definitely gonna use it during all those upcoming events we can’t wait to host!
If you need counsel on the streaming techniques, contact me via Twitter @andreuibanez and I’ll be glad to help!
