I/O 2021 Extended: Czechia — event summary
Czech Google communities are a close group 💙.
So it was without any question that such an important event as the I/O Extended 2021 would be online and created by a cross–Czechian team.
“As soon as the date was announced, we started thinking about how to make this year’s I/O Extended happen. As the I/O talks were all live-streamed, we were searching for a way to make the event more local friendly without organizing a face-to-face event,” says Filip, the community lead of GUG.cz.
The main organizer, Danny Macho, came up with an event format, where several local moderators from the community live-commented the I/O Keynote live stream.
“I started asking inside the community to find co-organizers for this event. I was especially interested to find co-moderators to host the live stream with. The plan was to have a streamed discussion before and after the I/O stream, so the viewers could get the local feel as an added value. I wanted to host the event with a maximum of 4 other people. I ended up finding three volunteers, for example, GDE Dominik Simonik,” says Danny.
Creating a live stream sounds easy, but the organizers faced several challenges along the way.
The community has been using StreamYard for online events since the start of the pandemic. But for this event, they wanted something more professional. So in the end, they used vMix. It was also decided that the stream will happen on YouTube.
Organizers used a Notion page and a separate Slack channel for the organization of the people participating and sharing information inside the community.
Right after all the “administrative” tasks were done, Danny started to think about visuals of the whole event. For the live stream, the preview image, together with the countdown video, layout, and animations, were all needed. So one of the organizers needed to be a graphic designer. “We did not have any visual guidelines for the event at the start. Only the day before the event I remembered to check the GDG platform for event graphics,” laughs Danny. He ended up designing the animations with his own imagination and taste in the end.
The organizers also had to find out about licenses for restreaming the content, before even starting. “Simple question to the GDG team in Google fixed the issue,” says Katka, co-organizer of the event.
Another challenge the organizers had to face was marketing. For Czech GDGs, the networking element works best when promoting an event, so many organizers turned to their social networks and shared the event there. And it worked! Most of the viewers ended up on the stream because they saw the promo of the event by someone they knew or because they were following the local GUG/GDG Facebook pages.
The last thing to do in the preparation phase was to find chat moderators for the event… and it was good to go! Chat moderators were responsible for checking the chat during the stream or deleting spam/ comments that break the Code of Conduct. Their role was key for this type of event.
“Few days before the event, all the moderators got a task from me: research the audience anticipation for the I/O, check the articles for various speculations and leaks,” lists Danny.
This exercise was meant to brief the moderators for the discussion before and after the event, where different speculations were brought up.
“We split the event into three parts:
1) Before Keynote, where moderators and viewers discussed the possible releases and news.
2) Keynote, where moderators jumped in only sporadically with their comments.
3) After Keynote, where we summed up what was presented and discussed with the audience their opinions,” explains Danny.
“In the end, we were able to overcome all the challenges and it was super fun and relaxed event! The video has almost 500 views today,” adds Filip.
You can check the record of the stream here (in the Czech language):
Google I/O 2021 Extended | Komentovaný přenos [CZ]
