How we brought a developers’ conference online in 2 months

As a remote-first company since 2009, we have put a lot of thought, time, and energy into how we organize our work online. Still, as community builders, so far we’ve been dedicated to offline events, organizing one of the biggest event for Scala developers in Europe — Scalar. Up until this March when we had to postpone the main event to October and decided to throw an online conference instead.

Over the years we have written a lot about the alchemy of remote teams, the ingredients that make them work, and flaws that can make them fail. In this post, we presents our lessons learned and the checklist for organising online event. We hope you find it informative.

Lessons learned from bringing an event online

The decision to bring Scalar online came naturally, as we saw it as a great opportunity to sharpen our virtual event chops. Still, we knew from the get-go of the challenges lying ahead. After all, Scalar leans heavily on the in-person component. This time we wanted to run an experiment and see to what extent we are able to replicate this experience in virtual reality.

We’ve also assumed that an online event gives us an opportunity to serve a much broader community and that’s why we decided to run a whole day event (from 6 AM to midnight CEST!), accessible to people from multiple time-zones.

How we got prepared

The most important change compared with an offline event was mastering the technical setup — we had to choose, test and dry-run everything. Also, detailed instructions were prepared in advance for the attendees, speakers, and organizers. Everything needed to be mapped out so that everyone was aware of the event’s setup and roles.

While running an offsite conference you don’t have to coordinate all the little details, because everyone knows how to navigate in real life. In virtual reality, you need to support people with details about many things like where to post questions to the talks, how to access different channels of communication and so on.

Technical setup for running a remote conference

We’ve used a combination of different tools. The main channel of communication was a quite obvious choice for us: Slack. It worked great for general announcements and information about the coming talks, as well as random discussions and whiteboard voting.

For streaming the talks we used StreamYard combined with YouTube. Questions during the presentations were asked in the YouTube chat and after the talks we had dedicated Q&A sessions on zoom. These three worked really great and we could definitely recommend it to other organizers.

For the social part we decided to go with hopin and remo.co as a backup. Both tools enable participants to join sessions/rooms where you can have multiple people talking to each other with both audio and video. Our goal was to facilitate a rich social experience, that’s why we wanted to try out these tools. Ultimately, it turned out that the social part wasn’t as popular as we thought it would be. And so an additional tool turned into an overhead for the attendees and it didn’t bring the value we hoped for.

Coordinating an online event

What worked for us was a detailed schedule with people assigned to different roles. We had hosts of the talks and Q&A sessions, Slack moderators, technical support and social media moderators. Around 20 people were engaged in running the event. Not fewer than in an offsite event, to our surprise.

In terms of the tools, we used a private channel on Slack and a room on Team Speak. It’s a push-to-talk solution, especially useful during intense situations when you need very quick collaboration. We used it mainly for coordinating the social part.

How we facilitated the social part of an online event

This was the biggest experiment. We’ve tried coming up with a format that would entail in-person contact, making the event really social. We’ve planned three 1 hour-long networking sessions during the day. All of them took place on hopin where we could have dedicated sessions (rooms).

The first one was a pub quiz, where participants answered questions about programming and community in teams of four. The questions were drawn by a wheel of fortune on a dedicated website. The second one was an unconference, where people submitted the topics and discussed them in smaller groups. Finally, the last session was a happy hour where everyone could join a random discussion over a beer or coffee.

Although we put high hopes into the social part, it didn’t turn out really popular. Only 22% of the participants who shared their feedback took part in networking. Some people told us that as the event lasted so long (16 hours!) they needed some break and used networking sessions for that. Others mentioned the current social situation (kids at home) as a reason. We might skip this part in the future or make it more asynchronous (like whiteboard polls on Slack, which worked really great).

After Scalar Online

Here are some really interesting insights we got from the feedback questionnaire after the event.

The online format worked well

It was great to see that 95% of the surveyed declared that they want to take part in the next edition of Scalar.

What was even more interesting is that the majority — 61% would like to attend both online and offline editions of the event. Out of the rest, an equal number of respondents (19%) declared that they would like to attend either an online or offline event, which is contrary to what we assumed. We thought that our community members value offline events a lot more. Still, it turns out that with an online event we’re able to reach more people and keep growing the community. We hope that at least to some extent, we’ve been a valuable resource of knowledge to our community and helped the community a bit in these tumultuous times.

Checklist for organizing an online conference

• Decide on the format of the event
• Choose the technical setup and test the tools
• Run the call for papers
• Launch the registration and promotion of the event
• Organize dry-runs with speakers
• Test the networking formats
• Write a detailed instruction for the participants
• Decide on the roles among organizers during the event (hosts, Slack moderator, technical support, social media moderator)
• Communicate the details through a Newsletter
• Build momentum on social media
• Prepare all the announcements and messages you will post during the event
• Have a dry-run of the event
• Prepare a feedback survey to be sent after the event
• Run the conference
• Publish videos from the talks
• Send a thank you to speakers
• Run a retrospective after the event

Big thanks to the other organizers of online Scala events who shared some really useful information about their events’ setup — Ryan Williams and Oli Kitty. Also, thank you to Darja Jovanovic from the Scala Center at EPFL for initiating an Online Organizers Summit that gave us lots of inspiration.

Now, we’re getting ready for the workshop edition of Scalar in October 2020. Follow us for updates about the next event.