✍️ Conference lessons
TLDR; What are the most important parts when you organize a conference and how to make sure to deliver the best experience to your audience.
👨💻 Who am I?
My name is Maxime Orefice and I’m a developer at Shopify working to make commerce better for everyone everywhere 🛒🚀🌍.
I moved to 🇨🇦 2 years ago when I fell in love with this amazing country. I’ve always been super close to the Paris Ruby community. And thanks to them I’ve found my happiness with programming in Ruby and I could earn my life doing the best job ever on the planet. That’s why I wanted to give something back to the community.
🗣 A conference you said
A year ago, I asked my friend Thibaut Assus what if this year, we dream bigger for the Ruby community in France. What if we host our own conference? That’s how https://2018.rubyparis.org was born 👶.
I’ll try to summarize and share all the lessons we’ve learned by organizing this conference. Here an exhaustive list of things I wished I would know a couple months ago:
🏛 The venue
Pick a centralized venue where as many people can join and well serve by transportation. Also, consider having comfortable chairs for your audience otherwise being sat all day long will hurt your back. If your conference happens during the summer AC is necessary. It’s also a plus if you can provide electrical outlets for your audience. And last but most important, triple check if your venue is disabled friendly.
📝 The speakers
Of course, one of the most important points of the conference is the quality of your talks. Make sure your speakers feel safe enough to share feedback with you. Train them before if they need to. Choose them depending on the quality of their slides, the quality of their content, their attitude on stage… Build a trust relationship with them so they can deliver the best possible talk to your audience.
🥖 The food
This topic is also very important. Providing high-quality food for 250 people is hard and require a lot of logistic efforts. Don’t hesitate to outsource it if you can’t handle it. In case your conference happens during the summer, make sure you give at least 2L of water per person per day to your audience to keep them hydrated. It is also extremely important to provide diverse food depending on your audience’s diet.
👥 The organization
This is about the people you are working with to make this event a success. Don’t hesitate to revisit your needs as frequently as possible. The sooner you raise an issue the quicker you will be able to fix it. People actually paid for their development and they want to get as many learnings from the conference so make sure you provide them the best experience.
🤱 The community
Finally, the last point is about your audience. Be transparent and communicate a lot with it. Make sure they connect each other by setting up events during the conference such as grabbing a drink in a coffee shop after the conference or a quick speed dating where they could grow their network easily and so on. The sooner they will meet, the stronger connection they will make.
✨ Conclusion
Have fun and meet as many people as you can. The magic will emerge from the community raising and growing together. We received many feedback which will help us to improve the event for next year. Overall the community was very enthusiastic and we all shared an amazing moment together.
🙇♂️ Thanks everybody who contributed to making this wonderful conference.
🎥 We just released the videos go check them 👉 here.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and learned something that will help you organize the best conference 🙏
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