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.

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:

1. The pre-show video
2. A countdown video
3. A video to build anticipation and
4. Introduction videos.

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.