Organizing a Fully Remote Tech Meetup from your Bedroom
With everyone around the world practicing Social Distancing because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, doing things remotely is now the new normal.
In particular, tech communities have started shifting to online events, workshops, and conferences. Tools such as Google Hangouts and Zoom saw a sudden increase of users as more and more people begin to rely on these tools to communicate with their friends, families, and co-workers.
On April 3, 2020, the Philippine Web Designers Organization and User Experience Philippines successfully pulled off a fully remote meetup on Zoom and YouTube Live.
Here’s how we did it, and how you can do it too.
Why Zoom and YouTube Live?
Before we get into the technical stuff, I’m going to share the process on how we chose the tools we used.
For context, we wanted to be inclusive and give our participants choices on how and where they could participate in the event. We held the meetup in two different channels, Zoom and YouTube Live, with Zoom being the main venue.
Zoom and YouTube Live were the chosen platforms based on the following criteria:
- Ease of Use and Accessibility
- Admin/Room Management Controls
Prior to the event, our team compared both Google Hangouts and Zoom in terms of features. Though Google Hangouts was free and (arguably) more secure, Zoom provided more comprehensive controls in terms of limiting what the participants can, and cannot do. One of the controls that we liked in particularly is Zoom’s Waiting Room feature, which allowed the organizing team to meet and set up everything before admitting people inside the room and going live (an ingress, in events management terms).
Aside from organizing the meetup in Zoom, we also set up a stream of the meetup on YouTube Live. In the past, we used Facebook Live as our livestream platform of choice. However, we recognized that not everyone wants to use their Facebook account and expose their personal information just to attend a meetup.
Our team decided that out of the two choices (Facebook and YouTube), YouTube was the better option. Our decision paid off too, because YouTube was faster and easier to set up compared to the sluggish and hacky experience you get when you stream on Facebook Live (if you’ve ever tried to connect OBS to Facebook Live, you’ll know what I mean).
What do you need to run a fully remote meetup?
With money being tight, we need to make the most out of what we have.
Before planning the remote meetup, make sure to prepare the following things:
- Devices for streaming
- Zoom Pro Subscription
- Well defined roles of the Organizing team
- Event Script and Pre-Recorded Speaker Talks (more on this later)
The stream set up was comprised of three devices, a desktop computer for streaming the Zoom room and the talks to YouTube, a laptop for screensharing the talks to the Zoom room, and a phone for communicating with everyone on the organizing team.
In terms of software, we used the free version of Streamlabs OBS. I liked how easy it was to set up and connect to our YouTube channel, and how easy it was to integrate donations to our stream.
Do you need a powerful or sophisticated computer to livestream a meetup?
No. In a previous meetup, I was able to livestream with just my Macbook Pro Late 2016. In my experience, the most important things you need to stream an event are the following:
- A good, stable internet connection and enough RAM and CPU power to keep things from stuttering (especially if you’re streaming and hosting the meetup on only 1 device).
- Good and well thought out topics for the meetup.
For context, my desktop computer’s processor was a Ryzen 5 1500x, which was more than enough for the type of content that we were going to stream. I also had the privilege of having a 50mbps Fiber connection at home.
How did you facilitate everything?
The biggest challenge in organizing a remote meetup is making sure everything runs smoothly.
Being in the Philippines, it’s a given that not everyone’s internet connections will be great. A lot of us here are not privileged to have access to Fiber internet or even stable 4G/LTE data.
To reduce the number of things that could potentially go wrong during the meetup, we asked the speakers to pre-record their talks. However, this came with it’s own set of challenges:
- How do we show the pre-recorded videos on the YouTube stream?
- How do we show the pre-recorded videos in the Zoom room?
After experimenting with our options during our test stream, we settled on the following:
- For the YouTube Stream: In Streamlabs OBS, We put each speaker’s talk in their own Scenes, and made separate Media Sources for the video files of their talks. This allowed us to share a high-definition copy of their talks with no delays.
- For the Zoom room: Since we were on video conferencing software, we accepted the fact that everything we do to display the speaker talks will have some sort of delay. We settled on screensharing the videos that the speakers sent. With this method, there was a slight drop in framerate in the videos, but the sound was still the same. In our experience, the bandwidth usage of Zoom was lower for the end user compared to YouTube Live. The tradeoff was well worth it for those in Zoom.
Technical details aside, another important aspect of successfully facilitating a remote meetup is a strong, well-organized team.
For the meetup, we identified the following roles that the people would be doing:
- Stream Master/Stream Pilot: The Stream Master or Stream Pilot is the person who will be in charge of managing the stream, timing the transitions, and playing the speaker videos. In our case, this was me because I had access to stable Fiber internet and had a desktop that could handle streaming while multitasking.
- Meetup Host: The meetup host is the person who engages with the audience, whether its in YouTube or Zoom. They’re also the one in charge of facilitating the Q&A sessions and panel discussions, as well as making sure the program flow is strictly followed.
- Zoom/YouTube Moderators: The Zoom and YouTube moderators would be the one watching over the chatrooms for potential issues, complaints, and violations of our Codes of Conduct. They would also be the ones in charge of blasting announcements to the participants in the chatrooms, such as donation links and other relevant information.
If you’re coming from an environment of physical meetups, you’ll be surprised to see how many of the roles in those meetups translate to remote meetups.
Insights and Closing Thoughts
For both PWDO and UXPH, we were used to holding large scale, in-person events. We’ve livestreamed some of our events before, but doing a fully-remote event was new territory for both of our orgs.
After the meetup, we’ve learned the following things:
- Our audience was more engaged both in YouTube and Zoom compared to our previous meetups. We think that communicating through a chatroom is less awkward for most people.
- We were able to retain a stable attendee count throughout the entire event. For context, we released a total of 80 tickets on Eventbrite, and we got 50 participants in Zoom and 20 participants in YouTube live. This figure stayed the same despite starting the meetup late and ending it late.
- The COVID-19 Pandemic shouldn’t prevent us from creating quality events for our communities. As tech communities, we shouldn’t let this pandemic let us down. We should continue to innovate and find ways for us to share knowledge to each other in the community.
Will we ever do a remote meetup again?
The answer is yes. This was a great experience for everyone involved, and it allowed us to explore a new, more inclusive meetup venue for everyone.
If you want to read or see a more in-depth guide on how you can set up your streaming environment, let me know by clapping for this article and sharing it to all your friends! If you want to see the end result of our livestream, you can see it here at: https://youtu.be/-amLnZxpDEA
