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.
Through a combination of survey results, industry experience and a no-bullshit approach to explaining problems and solutions, Sam Marsden recently shared his thoughts on the state of conferences talks.
In the following article, he explains the need to provide actionable takeaways, researching your audience and how all stakeholders at a conference can get involved to make presentations better.
We’ve previously spoken to a Developer Advocate (namely, Chloe Condon) for this very blog. But, at that time, we wanted to hear what she had to say about breaking into coding from a non-traditional background.
The more we learn from our customers here at Tito, the more we see the diversity in what they bring to the table using both their technological and interpersonal skills.
An example of when both traits come together, is developer advocacy, as Lynne Tye so eloquently puts it in her article sharing the experiences of multiple developer advocates explaining their careers.
Florin Nitu runs a freeCodeCamp in Brasov, Romania. At the time of his writing the post below, they’d just hosted their 40th event (and, as such, we’d like to offer them our [somewhat belated] congratulations).
Going from no interest to fostering a community of budding developers, Florin traced the steps that took place over those 40 events and shared what he learned in the process.
Everything about organizing an event is hard. Finding speakers, estimating attendance, securing a venue, scheduling, letting people know about the event, getting them badged, getting them wifi, getting them fed… all of this is hard.
One of the most outrageous-sounding solutions I’ve ever heard when it comes to organising an event is the brain child of Filip Hracek. Of all things, he proposed using a genetic algorithm to organise his conference schedule.
Taking into account all of the different stages of his developer conference, he calculated that there were a whopping 23! (factorial, that is) permutations of how the schedule could be lain out, taking into account talks, breaks and lunches across a single track and two days. He then went on to say, assuming considering each variation took a microsecond, that an organiser could potentially take 819 million years to go through all the variations.
Madness.
People usually use their brains to come up with a schedule that works based on the inexact science of common sense. However, by the power of automation, genetic programming, and (one can only assume) brimstone, he seems to have landed on the perfect timeline for a developer conference.
For the full article, go here: https://medium.com/@filiph/using-a-genetic-algorithm-to-optimize-developer-conference-schedules-27f13d97fa9a
Will Curran from Endless Events is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to all things AV. As even more of a god-send, his specialty is (as the company’s name would suggest) events.
The four types he suggests are:
He also suggests that conference organisers use “coming next” and recap videos to add to the experience.
Lena Reinhard likes raspberries, beautiful light, and good landscapes. She also loves public speaking and is an introvert.
Though this might seem like a contradiction in terms, she’s spent some time writing about the processes she uses when she prepares and writes conference talks.
From the audience’s perspective, it’s easy to think that good speakers just “have it”; that they sit down at their computers and start writing, and the magic flows from there.
However, if you’ve ever given such a talk yourself, you’ll know that quite a bit more goes into creating something that people actually want to hear. From finding good conferences to speak at, to applying, to dealing with rejection, Lena has put together a comprehensive outline of how she’s found success.
For the full, in depth article: http://wunder.schoenaberselten.com/2016/02/16/how-to-prepare-and-write-a-tech-conference-talk/
At Tito, we’re big fans of transparency. As probably the most sensitive subject when it comes to hosting events, a lot of organisers can find themselves alone when they’re considering how much they should be spending on their conferences, and what they should be focusing on.
With formidable style, the teams behind JSConf EU and CSSConf have shared how much it costs them to host their events, and why the numbers add up to that total.
For the full breakdown, visit their site: https://2019.jsconf.eu/news/the-jsconf–cssconf-eu-finances/
Any podcast that’s been going for 145 episodes immediately sparks curiosity in me. Usually, if there’s that much of a commitment, there must be a similarly large amount of demand. And, after listening to a few episodes of the Eventicons podcast, I can see why.
This particular episode sees the hosts and guests discuss their favourite tools of the year in the event industry and beyond. From VR to just really good fiction books, they cover a lot of ground, and managed to put a lot of smiles on my face.
Getting the UX Collective newsletter to my inbox is one of my favourite parts of the week.
Given the nature of UX and design, it’s inevitably pretty, unavoidably interesting, and rapturously engaging.
Recently, they put together a list of their most highly recommended UX/design conferences for this year and, given the level of expertise I’ve seen them share since subscribing, I’d take them on their word.
Yes, yes, yes, we’re 17 days into it, but Advent is here, and Christmas is nearly here.
To mark the holiday, here’s an advent calendar full of short programming puzzles (one for each of the 24 days of advent) to get stuck into. Eric Wastle made it.
If you get through them at lightening speed, here’s the 2017 version.
This post won’t tell you how to sell out your tickets or get funding. Nor will it tell you how to mingle, or the jokes to tell to make strangers like you.
What it will do, is give you a friend.
In this case, someone who tells the story of the nerves and intrusions that are our plus-one for most of us at conferences: Fear.
Bonnie Abbot asks hard questions and gives honest answers.
She’s organised conferences, attended them, and found both endeavours wanting, but also puts forth the case for making design events better.
Here, she showcases a six point dissection of reasons as to why some conferences are crappy, from a lack of consideration for people with children to speaker line-ups that are regurgitated year on year.
Refreshingly, she highlights the virtuous attempts by certain conferences to thwart these disappointments, namely XOXO, DjangoCon, and Úll, among others. She also goes into what we can all practically do to rectify the state of design conferences; the advice is also applicable to the conference industry at large.
For the full article, go here. And please read to the end: https://uxdesign.cc/does-your-design-conference-suck-c008b42ab447
I’m always a little wary of business advice articles that promise quick wins or tips. I get more wary with each number the writer adds to the title, most of the time.
For this list, I’ve made an exception. Aside from being shared over 5,000 times on social media, the team at Small Business Trends didn’t pull their tips from thin air, a sin that a lot of publications are guilty of. Instead, they asked people behind successful events to contribute, and so curated their event management tips from such veterans as Julius Solaris of EventMB, two event agency CEOs, and the Managing Director of event consultancy, Doubet.
The list goes through specific ways to organise contingency plans, affordable promotion activities, and the benefits of writing down specifics, as well as what those specifics should be.
CW: Harassment
The post we’ve linked below refers to breaches of Code of Conduct at Learn Inbound and, in turn, references issues of harassment.
Mark, founder of Learn Inbound, took some time to write up their latest conference. There, a number of women were harassed, despite the best practices they had in place. As such, the post discusses what happened, the prevention measures they had in place, and their practical commitment to improving on those for future conferences.
Upon finding this resource and deciding to share it on the Tito blog, I immediately Googled “German word for wishing you’d thought of it first.”
Peter-Paul Koch founded QuirksMode, self-described as the prime source for browser compatibility information on the internet.
That’s interesting and all, but my prerogatives make me far more drawn to his extensive, and damn useful conference organiser handbook, the full text of which is right here:
If you’re interested in a (more niche) guidebook for conference organisers, we’ve got you covered too:
In a wonderfully honest portrayal of the high-octane emotional state we get in to when we come together at a conference and discuss all that goes into what we do, why we do it, and what we do when we don’t, Virginia Roberts suggests that we should all cry.
