In pulling TRANSFORM 2020 together, the organizers (Filippo Broggini, Brendon Hall, Rob LEckenby, Victoria-Lou Devezes, and me) looked at a lot of technology options. I thought I’d share the stuff we used here, in case you’re wondering what you need for a full-on virtual conference. But first, I’ll try to give a high-level description of the sorts of events we hosted at the conference.
We had three main types of session to support:
Tutorials
We hosted 14 three-hour tutorials, which mostly involved one or two instructors and 10 to 150 learners. Behind the scenes, there was one ‘livestream host’, who was essentially like a TV director.
The instructors were in a Zoom meeting with the host, sharing screens with them. The host captured their Zoom meeting with OBS Studio, and streamed it to YouTube Live. All of the participants watched via YouTube, and the live stream is also preserved there.
Lightning talks
There were two lightning talk sessions, each two hours long. The set-up was similar to the tutorials, except that there were more presenters — 12 per session. They came into the Zoom just before their allotted time and left right after, so there were never more than 3 or 4 people in the Zoom at once.
Unsessions
These were not streamed to YouTube, so we were able to host everyone in one big Zoom meeting. (I had a Large Meeting add-on ‘just in case’ but we didn’t need it in the end; the most we had was 97 people.) This made the session susceptible to Zoom-bombing, so we were careful about where we shared the link, and we used a waiting room — with Victoria ‘on the door’ to let people in promptly.
The unsession format, which I’ll write about another time, relied heavily on Zoom’s breakout rooms. We also used GroupMap a lot — it’s a great tool for capturing ideas from a group of people.
Here are the tools we used:
Slack — the heart and mind of the Software Underground already lives in our Slack workspace. To make the multiple conversations more manageable, we made channels for all of the sessions and hackathon projects, and this worked well. During the week, 700 active members exchanged about 19,000 messages, about 50% of which were in private chat.
Zoom — the Covid-famous video conferencing tool. It worked well for us for the host–presenter meetings in the tutorials and lightning talks, and as the main room for the unsessions and hackathon presentations. We were very worried about Zoom-bombing, and were perhaps over-cautious (some legit people found it hard to enter sessions).
YouTube — for the tutorials and lightning talks, we streamed the host–presenter Zoom to YouTube for participants to consume. This has a few big advantages: it eliminates the Zoom-bombing risk, participants can pause and rewind the live stream, and videos go straight to YouTube afterwards. And it’s free!
OBS Studio — a fantastic open-source tool that lets you combine images, video feeds, and audio sources into a single stream, which you can send to YouTube (or Twitch or any other streaming service). This is how we streamed the Zoom sessions. It does have a learning curve though, and certainly requires an off-screen ‘director’ to manage it all — and several practice sessions to get the workflow down.
GitHub — is indispensable for code-sharing and source control. I think all of the hackathon projects hosted their repos on GitHub. The tool is not intuitive for new programmers though, and wrangling git and GitHub is one of the most requested help topics in our hackathons and courses.
GroupMap — a wonderful tool for collaborative brainstorming. It definitely needs a couple of hours to get the hang of what it can do, but for me this was the standout discovery of the event. Its best feature is that you can set up a workflow, like Survey > Brainstorm > Vote > Results and then guide the group through the stages, live.
Sched and Eventbrite — for event registration. Both of these tools have their high-points — Sched is really nice for building the event schedule — but the registration process for the event was a bit of a hairball and while these tools are supposed to play nicely together, I never felt comfortable with either of them.
Printful — a T-shirt (and other merch) vendor. The advantages are that they print ‘direct to garment’ (i.e. there’s no setup, they just print a shirt when you order one), they take care of fulfilment, and their system works seamlessly (sort of) with Squarespace, our website host. But the system is not that easy to use and I’m thinking of switching to Teespring.
We also used a bit of hardware. Microphones were hard to find during the Covid-19 crisis, but we sent Blue Yeti Nano or Blue Snowball Ice USB mics to our instructors. The Yeti Nano is especially nice, with two pickup patterns and a hardware mute button.
Other… The organizers and the participants used other tools during the conference, including: Mentimeter, Google Maps, Miro, and HackMD, plus of course Twitter and other social media.
I don’t think I appreciated it before the event — looking back, it seems obvious — but technology is completely intertwined with an online-first event. Sometimes the limitations of the tool force you to adapt; other times, the tool can enable new things you hadn’t thought of. It’s going to be interesting watching these remote collaboration tools evolve over the coming months and years. And even more interesting thinking about what kinds of meetings we can have with them!
If you have a favourite collaboration tool I haven’t mentioned here, or you’ve been in a meeting that did something different, I’d love to hear about it.