A Family Event

Family is at the core of Úll. Every year, for the very last scene, we get everyone up on stage to take a family photo. We adopted this from JSConf EU, who inherited it from JSConf US, where it was started by Chris Williams. If you know Chris, you know how important family is to him, and it’s through his influence that family is important to us.

The Wedding Format

The emphasis on family brings a few things to the table. The first is atmosphere. Gruber, in his first year at Úll, described the format to me as “The Wedding Format”. Much like the inheritance chain above, the wedding format was adopted from Çingleton, who inherited it from C4, the original modern indie Apple developer community conference. It goes like this: informal dinner the day before. Ceremonies (aka talks), during the day, followed by a sit down meal, and some kind of after-dinner, between courses, or pre-dinner “speech”.

The reason the wedding format works so well for a conference is that it creates a particular atmosphere that we associate with relaxation, enjoyment, fun and celebration. For a networking event where perhaps the main aim is to get the business card of your next big prospect, maybe these aren’t so important. For an event whose goals are building strong relationships, appreciation of great work, building things that are delightful and celebrating all of the above, the elements of the wedding format are vital.

Kids

For the past three years, Úll has maintained a very active “bring your kids” policy. There has actually been kids at every Úll since the first, but we have particularly encouraged it since 2014, and last year hosted the first kids’ track after feedback from the first year.

I first experienced kids at a conference at nodeconf USA at Walker Creek Ranch in 2013. There’s something extraordinarily leveling about having young folk around in a “professional” setting. Children bring a reality to a situation that is oft (and perhaps intentionally) absent from events allowing parents to “get away” for work. Kids bring a level of delight to situations in only the way the joy of childhood can. They remind us of what raw delight is. And perhaps crucially, adults are better behaved when there are kids around.

For me, kids bring another focus to light: the interplay between the past, the present and the future. We often hear “our kids futures” in talks and sessions about building things for the future. There’s something cathartic and appropriate when those kids are together with you in the room.

Trust

In his essay Building Serendipity, Rands’ penultimate point culminates in a phrase that has formed the cornerstone of how I think about events:

I’m eating an awful ham and cheese sandwich and drinking a Sam Adams when I ask Blake what his favorite part of Funconf was, and he gives the same answer everybody does about any conference: “Well, it’s the people, right?”

We hear folks use phrases like “my people”, and people that “get it” to describe this. We’re not really sure what that means when we say it, but it’s a bit like family. People who you know you can disagree with, but there’s always something there that connects you.

Your Third Family

After the third Funconf, Werner Vogels introduced the concept to me of my “third family”, and that’s really when I doubled down on making event design all about that family feeling.

If it’s true that you can choose your friends but not your family, your third family are the friends you would choose to be family.

Events serve many, many purposes. We go to events to be entertained. To escape. To network. To make important connections. To learn things. To learn how to use the things we’ve learned. To unwind.

But sometimes we come away with something that we didn’t expect. Relationships that seem more real, more genuine, more fortuitous than perhaps we could have imagined.

Sometimes we find a third family. And that’s why Úll is a family event.