Ada Rose Cannon is a developer advocate at Samsung. She’s also co-chair of the W3C Immersive Web Working Group. Adding another string to that ever-expanding bow, Ada’s taken the time to share solid advice as to how change can and should begin when it comes to conference diversity issues.

In this post on Medium, Ada highlights key concerns like these:

• Pay people who help you with your conference diversity — if you value diversity, you should value the work that goes into promoting it.
• Diversity and inclusion aren’t just relevant when it comes to speakers — how are you addressing diversity in your organising team, volunteers and participants?
• Developing a diversity and inclusion policy that dictates the standards your team requires to get involved with a conference is something that can help steer your efforts proactively and continuously.

For further reading, you can check out the rest of her Medium articles or refer to her website.

Preparing to stand on a stage to talk about yourself, your work, and the accomplishments you’re proud of is one of the most jarring professional experiences. The generally intimidating nature of public speaking aside, there’s usually a niggling fear that what you’re going to say won’t resonate; that the crowd’ll have heard it all before, or even if they haven’t, someone else could tell that story better.

Thankfully, that’s usually just inner demons playing tricks on us, but with all that running through our minds before we give talks at events, it can be hard to focus on anything else, even something as simple as meeting new people and connecting with other attendees afterwards.

Writing for Fast Company, Christine Clapp shares five tips to help make the process of networking after your talk a bit easier. From helping the audience to remember what you look like so they can find you later, to sticking around after you’ve given your talk (no matter how tired you are!), these seemingly simple tasks become very valuable when you’re grappling with nerves, stress, and PowerPoint.

Event organisers, in my experience, are exceptionally good at dealing with finer details. That might take the form of making sure the lights in a conference hall are of just the right warmth. It might also show itself in the font they choose for their attendee’s badges.

One seemingly small part of events that often gets overlooked, though, is speaker Q&A. On the Slido blog, they’ve put together a set of fresh options for organisers to inject some more life in their Q&A slots, and we thought it wise to share it with you today.

From pre-seeding questions, to abandoning traditional talks altogether, it’s unlikely you’ll experiment with all of their recommendations in one fell swoop, but by trying out one or two, you can gauge what suits your audience the best.

Information overload is really real. Conferences are a single day or couple of days that are designed to cram information (and those who crave it) in a small physical and temporal space.

And they’re great, don’t get me wrong.

But, have you ever left a conference feeling like you have a stack of ideas that’s almost toppling over? You’re excited to become the best version of your newly enlightened self, yet you have no idea where to start.

You try out a handful of the tips, but inevitably lose steam and abandon the new workflow/software/productivity hack that you’d been so passionate about in the heady aftermath of the conference environment.

An author from Smashing Conf has a solution for that.

If you’ve been keeping up to date with the articles we’ve put out in the last few weeks, you might be familiar with a post I recently published about how not to treat guest speakers at your conference.

One of the points I made was about making things easier for conference MCs. I then came across this post by Justin Halsall where he goes into depth on his 10+ years as an MC for different tech events.

He shares insights from planning to content to tech. Well worth a read if you want to improve the attendee and speaker experience at your next event.

Finding a great name begins by understanding what your event is about, what you’re trying to accomplish with this event, and why your event is superior to others like it.

Coming up with a name for something you’re in the process of bringing to life is one of the hardest parts of the creative process. When it comes to events, their names are the core pillar of your branding. They’re the word or string of words that people will know your event by, so it’s worth putting the time in to get it right.

Here, Maria Waida gives a five-step process for making it memorable and remarkable.

In the tech conference circuit, the names WWDC, I/O, and F8 mean a lot, but do they mean as much as they used to?

Writing for ZD Net, Bill Detwiler argues that the focus on product updates, launches, and general furor around the internal updates from the companies that run these large-scale industry conferences are taking away from the experience.

He walks us through the approach Salesforce favours. That being that they focus on the developers and development that birth the products and services that these conferences’ huge crowds go crazy for.

If you’re not familiar with the Shop Talk Show, it’s an internet radio show, about the internet! This episode, from June 2019, features Tito co-founder, Paul.

Throughout his conversation with Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier, Paul describes the technology and journey behind Tito. If you were ever curious about our origin story, and what makes Tito tick behind the scenes, now’s your chance.

In case you’re not familiar with Marc Thiele, he runs beyond tellerand, a conference that takes place at multiple times of the year, across multiple German cities. This year, he ran into an issue that most (if not all) event organisers will have faced as part of their careers: a difficult venue hunt.

On Marc’s blog, he recently shared his journey towards re-homing the Berlin edition of the conference:

I knew it was going to be hard to find a new home for the event. Not because the size or the room layout only, but mostly because I had a picture in my head. I wanted something reflecting the ”beyond tellerrand style”of running events like this. I did not expect it to be that complicated.

What follows is a tale of 34 venues, concessions, values, and most of all reflections on the pressure conference organisers come under.

The full article is linked above, and you’ll be delighted to hear there’s a happy ending.

In this, the 687th episode of The Hanselminutes Podcast (hosted by Scott Hanselman) Saron Yitbarek shares what it takes to build a truly inclusive conference.

Saron is the founder of the CodeNewbie community and Codeland conference. Her work with these initiatives was born of the challenges she noticed new coders faced when trying to break into the industry. As such, she’s fostered the welcoming spaces they’ve were looking for.

In her conversation with Scott that we’ve linked above, she shares the processes and ethos behind her work in full detail.

More ticket options.
More speakers.
More keynotes.
More panels.
More technology.
More social media accounts.
More food.
More drinks.
Because more is better. Right?
More Choice = More Attendee Satisfaction = Better Event

We can all agree on that. But I don’t like assumptions, so I decided to investigate.

Julius Solaris is the editor of EventMB, one of the most popular online publications in the events industry. In a guest post for the MICE blog, he recently shared his insights on a paradox of choice event organisers are presenting to their attendees.

The crux of his argument is that more isn’t always better, and that perhaps the industry’s focus should shift to quality over an evolving obsession with quantity.

An honest appraisal of the highs and lows of bringing back a design conference after a six year hiatus.

Also, I think we were guilty of believing our own hype, that the constant requests for us to return and the buzz, once we’d announced, might guarantee another success. We were wrong.

— @colly

I was at this year’s event, as well as the three previous incarnations. Fantastic speakers and talks aside, community spirit is a mainstay of the conference.

I can’t wait for January.

Saying you can predict what’s going to happen in 10 years is, at best, sorcery, and at worst, a scam. Many outlets share their speculations about the future of our industry, but lots are bogus. That’s because there are so few people who have enough experience as to make their guesses credible.

In this article, featured on Entrepreneur, we get to meet someone who fits into that second category. Bernando Moya is the founder of the Best You Expo, Europe’s largest trade show focused on personal development.

Practicing what he preaches, he shares his predictions for what the next big shifts in the event space are going to be.

He foresees virtual events and online engagement as key issues. Thankfully for us, he then shares how these changes can be embraced.

In 2018, 20+ tech events were brought together in the same room by Startup Sesame at their annual kick-off. 

Their goal was to discuss the most pressing issues in the tech event industry, to share best practices, and to help grow each other’s businesses. 

The team recorded the topics of interest, and the attempted resolutions in a recent Medium post. From sales, to community involvement, to better technologies, the takeaways are certainly worth reflection, and action. 

In this episode, Bryan, Paul and Nick chat with Tito’s co-founder and CEO, Paul Campbell. The team discusses Tito and its architecture, from its early days using Rails and CoffeeScript, to its current use of Rails with modern JS including Vue and custom elements.

One for the developers: some inside baseball on how we’ve built Tito’s architecture over the years and what lies ahead.

“These developer conferences are still full of innovation, but that sense of experimentation — the risk factor, the ‘look what we just did’ — is gone.”

Upon reviewing this year’s Google I/O keynote, Lance Ulanoff remains unimpressed by AI that can detect lung cancer before a human. 

In place of a simple account of announcements pertaining to the launches he saw, he tells us about the overshadowing caution that the largest tech companies have been forced to uphold as their modus operandi. 

The now forced accountability tech companies have earned themselves when it comes to reclaiming consumer trust in an era of its degradation has lead to a situation where the joy and creativity of tech events has nearly disappeared, he argues. 

By the same token, he admits that the former overzealous hubris of these presentations can lead to an audience of shaking heads. However, he closes with a simple line detailing a complex ask: 

“I want to be amazed again.”

Most people I’ve spoken to about getting started hosting conferences have said that they got there “by accident”.

Here, Darren W. Johnson (founder of Event U) shares his journey from jet mechanic, to truck driver, to corporate event planner, and its many twists and turns. 

Between product feedback and meeting with the community directly, Hackathons help developers and their sponsors alike. This is particularly effective for people in the startup community who are hoping to grow their businesses.

Here, Smartcar brings you through their reasons why this is the case.

Sara Vieira is a developer advocate at YLD.io. As anyone who’s hosted, attended, or spoken at conferences professionally will tell you, conference overload is a very real thing.

Here, Sara covers this subject on the ScriptCast podcast. She learned how to slow down the hard way and, as such, shares her story about her path to a healthier work/life balance.

Ever been to a BBQ with 6,000 other people?

Maybe, if you’ve been to TechBBQ, though it didn’t start out like that. In 2012, five Danish entrepreneurs came together to host the first incarnation of the event. There, 150 people in tech came together to talk shop at their first meetup in Copenhagen. 

Since then, the event has gone from strength to strength, now employing 10-12 full-time staff, hosting the aforementioned 6,000 guests, and showcasing two days of content that’s helped countless businesses scale and see out their ambitions.

Here, Sifted have provided a wonderful write-up on a wonderful event. 

Finding the right conference to go to can be hard. Even if you have a specialism, there are an overwhelming number of options on offer nowadays, and we as attendees (and our bosses as sometimes-sponsors for our participation) don’t have unlimited budgets to go to everything that’s out there. That’s where resources like this come in.

The team at TidBits have curated a list of high-quality Mac and iOS professional events and conferences that they recommend as a shortlist to help narrow down your search.

We’d also like to share a quick congrats to Tito customers UIKonf and 360|iDev for being featured. ?

Event Industry News is is an online magazine that provides the latest news, views and reviews of the events industry.

Recently, our CEO, Paul, spoke with their podcast host, James Dixon bout crafting and carefully considering everything that goes into Tito.

For the full interview:

Every once in a while event organisers, amid the hectic schedules their roles require, come together at events that focus on them for a change. Admission was one such experience, and the recent Global Event Forum hosted by the ILEA is another.

The conference brought together 30 leaders in the events industry to discuss and analyse the wins and challenges of the space last August in Denver, Colorado.

As well as the fascinating takeaways the conference produced, the team at ILEA have put together a report on the industry that shares insights into communicating value as event professionals, selling creativity, and differentiating your events.

Please note, this is a downloadable asset gated by a quick form where you’ll have to put in your name, email and company name to access it.

A distilled version of the Center for Exhibition Industry Research Gender Differences and Similarities report was recently published by Kaylee Hultgren writing for eventmarketer.com.

In it, she shares findings on attendee motivation, learning objectives and perceptions of ROI.  From note-taking to product purchases, the disparities in the results were truly surprising.