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Sarah Thiam — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 09:30:24 +0000

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End-to-end guide to a livestream conference in 3 weeks

Sarah Thiam — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 08:53:18 +0000

So it’s been 6 weeks of COVID-19 in Singapore and the region, thanks for following my journey through this 6 weeks to turn quite a few in-person developer activities, into online events.

This last chapter is about our final sprint and a how-to guide for managing tight timelines to create a livestreamed conference, from conceptualization to execution, involving 21 speakers, across 7 countries, in a 4-hour livestream. Hope this helps you as a reference point of how you can adjust to suit your quite turnaround needs!

I’ll reference great resources from other DevRel-ers throughout! In the past weeks, many more pro tips on planning and setup of remote events have been written, as others work around the pandemic too. Let’s get through this crisis together.

Also, bearing in mind that virtual events are not a new format and there are many great existing resources. Will highlight existing marketing resources.

Most importantly, you as an organizer, needs to hear that it is perfectly okay not to run any activity at all in these times.

For whatever reason. This is a tough period for us all, and psychological and physical safety come first. And trust me when I say that the community is nothing but supportive of it. If you ever need to talk about it, or hear reinforcement, my teammate Jack Skinner, @developerjack and I @truckerfling are available to DM.

Now if you feel like you are in a good place to plan for one, here goes.

End-to-end guide to a livestream conference in 3 weeks

Most suitable for: community-initiated conferences that are getting postponed and want to turn it virtual in a short timeline e.g. DevOps Days. Voxxed Days, Javascript Conference and the like.

Based on: a 4-hour livestream, with 21 speakers, across 7 countries. You can see the full example of Microsoft Tech Community APAC Online (registration page and on-demand).

21 days to event: planning from scratch

Assemble your core team for planning. At minimum, this should include:
- Content role to manage rescheduling speakers, adapting agenda and forming your on-demand plan
- Demand generation role to get the word out about the changes, the new/revised event, communication assets for inviting pre-event and follow ups post-event
- Technical/Operations role to focus on production from livestream to on-demand
- Producer to focus on flow of event
Assemble your core team for onsite livestream. Not enough people available on those new dates? People can double up from initial core team. At minimum, this should include:
- Producer to focus on flow of event. This one person is in charge of all actions and changes to schedule onsite and will determine what does or does not get published to attendees. They must be your single point of contact and ideally familiar with events, technology and event agenda so they can make the best decisions.
- Social role to manage all amplification and social engagement during the livestream, to create sense of community and network Live moderator to ensure all online Q&A and user familiarity of online platform well managed.
- Emcee key to re-create meetup environment online, and maintain a safe and inclusive space online
- Production team. Best to get a proper crew to ensure audio and visual are functioning smoothly, so content is reusable for on-demand as well. If you are low on budget, this article on budget streaming options by Kevin Lewis is helpful.
- Quality assurance role. Literally, 1 person to watch the stream throughout and flag if any issues from attendee standpoint.
Double-confirm your event format. Livestream is great for creating a sense of community online, but may not always be your best/only option.
- To evaluate options, here is a good virtual event 101 by Endless Events.
- For DevRel, my $0.02 is that livestream is best for re-creating the feeling of community online, do it completely live and it will seem the most organic and meet up-like. Simulated-live is great for the enterprise customer as it will flow very smoothly but can feel a little too cold for a community type event.
- We chose Microsoft Teams Live because it had the stream time (4 hours) and audience size capacity (10K viewers) AND auto-captioning in multiple languages which we needed for Southeast Asian audiences. A comparison of platform options is covered in my earlier post from the series.
- Worth thinking about your audience's connectivity capabilities. For example, if the audience has generally low connectivity, you can explore doing pre-recorded videos with detailed documentations and links in the video description. Live may not be your best option here.
Triple-confirm your budget. This will help you determine your virtual format and core team members needed.
- Plan adequately for production setup, post-production editing for on-demand, manpower, virtual swag/shipping swag. Here’s a great comparison on platforms by Kevin Lewis to help you decide.
- As a very rough estimate, my guidance is:
  - USD$0 – as per the Chinese saying 一分钱，一份货 (every cent, every piece of goods), you get what you pay for. You can continue with a computer cam and mic, and the quality will be on par with a usual online meeting.
  - USD$3-5K – invest in a simple DIY setup and stream from there. Check out this guide by GM Cusiac.
  - USD$5-10K – engage some videography professionals, do post-production yourself
  - USD$10-50K – engage a crew for full production and post-production

This was our set up on the day with the 3rd option, in our Singapore office:

18 days to event: lock in essential parts and confirm your event is happening

Confirm speakers
- Content role to reach out to all speakers and ask them for availability and willingness to participate in a now-virtual conference
Confirm tech setup
- Technical/operations role to confirm the set up requirements are available and that this is technically possible.
Based on the above two factors, confirm your date and publish your event.
- Time is short by now. Once the event is confirmed to be happening, the Content role needs to stitch together your agenda.
- Expect that speaker availabilities may not be perfect, so your agenda will need to be flexible. This is especially the case should your speakers be located from various regions. Time zone matters.
- To prevent it looking like Frankenstein stitched weirdly together, a hack is to broadly categorize the various content and present your agenda in sections. For example, we presented our agenda within 3 sections – tech-focused, profile-focused, diversity & inclusion categories – and kept the diverse, original session titles within those broad categories.
- Publish your event ASAP. Whilst you will ideally have 3 weeks for this, in this case, I strongly recommend a minimum of 7 days to drive demand generation to your event. Reg pages are editable, they don’t need to be perfect at this point.

10 days to event: drive demand generation hard and optimize the experience

DevRel is great for spreading the word
- Leverage core team’s, speakers’ networks and communities to spread the word.
- Turn this situation into a good outcome. There are many learnings from sudden change. Have everyone write some thought pieces on it and direct readers to join the event.
Plan for accessibility. Here’s a good list of considerations by Debra Guckenheimer
With some time to breathe, you can now look at optimizing your event experience
- Tips for a good virtual event experience, here’s a helpful article by Elisha Tan
- Good ideas on how to re-create a community conference experience online by remembering why people join communities. Here’s a gentle reminder by Peculiar Ediomo-Abasi
- I advocate for virtual swag of e-books! It’s zero waste, low on carbon to send across, lasting and educational!
Plan for social. Since it’s a virtual community event, social is more important than ever.
- Supplement your event with a live hashtag chat on Twitter
- Running a contest on social for fun and for more swag
Plan for on-demand. Maximise your stream!
- This article by IBM’s DevRel has a very clear explanation on the on-demand options you have to play around with.
Rehearse the whole flow at least 3 times and be ultra-prepared. Livestream leaves A LOT to chance, so you’ll want to best minimize your risk and unknowns beforehand.
- 1st rehearsal – core team only. To fix roles and responsibilities during the stream and technical issues.
- 2nd rehearsal – with speakers. Have them confirm which device they are presenting from, ensure they can dial in and present screen without issue and confirm their presentation location that's suitable for stream
- 3rd rehearsal – finalize the flow and make it as smooth as possible.
- NEVER rehearse on your actual stream link that has been publicized. (I did that LOL, that wasn't my best moment because it ended the event even before it started)

We had our team's handles spread the word on social:

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Our speakers helped spread the word too:

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And the power of community came through, where some sites picked up on our event and shared it. Thank you DiversifyTech!

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Actual day:

Bring back-up devices to present and stream from
Publicize on social that your event is now going live
Stay calm, mistakes are common on live events and the audience tends to be more forgiving
Remember what matters in your event, ultimately this is a community conference and while quality is an ideal we aim for, we are also supportive of each other. If any live hiccups take place, it is an okay fix for the emcee to laugh it off like we would in any in-person community conference :)

A screenshot from Teams Live event on the day! We had Leanne Robers of female founders community She Loves Tech dialing in from Indonesia:

1-4 weeks after event: with virtual, post-event views can have more impact than views during the event

Thank you emails to speakers and attendees to go out 3-7 days after event and communicate when they can expect recordings.
There are many ways to release on-demand content, some do it weekly for an extended period of time, some do it all an once. Best to discuss how this can align with your community's needs, before the event.

And that’s it! If you want to see how it turned out, you can check out the Microsoft Tech Community APAC Online on-demand playlist.

Also sharing how going virtual allowed us to reach further than expected. It allowed us to include devs in India too!

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And to reiterate, this is a tough period for everyone. If you, your team, or your audience don’t have the headspace to do this, it is totally acceptable not to do anything and focus on staying physically and psychologically safe during this period first.

Also worth thinking about sensitivities of running business as usual during a time of crisis, as community may potentially find it jarring or even offensive and perceive this as a dismissal of the severity of this virus situation and the people affected.

Important to shout out to my team as well. These learnings were consolidated after a month of our combined efforts. Thanks Suzanne @theCatShepherd, Olivia @OliviaHa2, Annie @annpmathew, Anna @a_chu Daniel, Dickson.

Tired is tired, after going from 7am to 4pm, we finished!! My brows still on point:

All the best and stay safe.

Quickly turning in-person meetups to virtual

Sarah Thiam — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 06:04:45 +0000

In the 2 weeks since my last post on managing initial cancellations of community activity due to COVID-19, we quickly turned things around and ran 3 virtual meetups in the span of 4-7 days.

These meetups were co-organized between the communities and myself (they did most of the work!) as we had both previously committed audience and speakers. I'm so so thankful for everyone's willingness to adapt and experiment. This is what we all need right now.

In Part 2 here, I'll share my experience on virtual community meetup experiments, considerations and platform comparisons.

Context

For those reading this in retrospect of the COVID-19 period, or if you needed to tune out of the news for a bit (I know, it's a lot) here's brief context of the global situation in relation to the dev scene.

Today, the virus is sort of in "wave 2". I totally invented this analogy, for easy explanation in this post. Wave 0 was China, Wave 1 were badly affected Asian countries (Singapore, Japan, Taipei etc.) and we went through the whole cycle of panic buying, border control, event cancellations. Wave 2 are the next round of countries to have spiked number of cases (Korea, Italy, Iran etc.) and with early news, it seems US may be Wave 3. touch wood

During each wave, the DevRel scene generally goes through a few phases - news watching to see how bad the situation really is, doubt and hesitation to cancel your events or not, everyone starting to cancel and so you quickly do so too, busy discussions on whether to postpone or go virtual or cancel, crazy busy planning to go virtual, trying to think about how to make sense of the million virtual events now going on.

This article intends to help with reducing the crazy busy planning to go virtual with dev communities.

So, how can you switch quickly from in-person to virtual meetups?

Decide to go virtual, postpone or cancel with your community: The decision mostly comes from a place of understanding the effort put into preparing for a talk. If you have speakers prepped and ready to go, with time booked in, it's great to do a virtual meetup and respond to adversity with agility. Meeting in-person doesn't have to be a deal breaker.
If your speakers are also affected by the pandemic in some way, or have not yet prepared then perhaps you can postpone.

I try not to cancel because it can be demoralizing to speakers, organizers and even to audiences who perhaps can use some community connection in this time of public panic and isolation. Whatever it is, decide with and not for, your community.

Need help convincing your stakeholders? Major pros of virtual:
- Cost nothing
- Demand generation run way is about 4 days minimum (a quarter of in-person event's)
- It's more accessible than in-person events, with the captioning and ease of attending from comfort of your own setup
- You can now expand your meetup to a wider geography since physical barriers are not an issue
- You won't get the virus?

Now that you are going to go virtual, choose your platform: So this time, we did virtual meetups with Singapore Javascript (on Zoom), Microsoft AI-ML Singapore (on Teams Live), .NET Developers Singapore (YouTube Live). (Shoutout to the community leaders who refused to give in to the virus, and went ahead on this with us Min Ong, Michael Cheng, Riza Marhaban, Goh Chun Lin, Setu Chokshi, Sakthis Kumar)

Coincidentally, they all took place on the same evening and I had a chance to observe differences in community experience and engagement across platforms. Sharing my breakdown and considerations that might help your decision-making:

	Microsoft Teams Live	Zoom	YouTube Live
Presentation	Can see both presenter and shared screen	Can only see shared screen	Can only see shared screen Ads still pop out
Interactivity	Can only see presenter’s cam, no option to see the rest or beyond 4 profiles. Hard to interact especially if new to community Moderated Q&A was strictly Q&A which led to the least interaction (2 questions in 60 mins)	Access to all profiles/videos of attendees throughout made the virtual meeting feel more like a meetup Open Q&A chat, had the highest engagement (14 questions in 75 mins)	No access to see any other members other than presenter which limited interactivity Open Q&A chat (7 questions in 40 mins). Only platform that includes history of chat if some join late.
Accessibility	Live captioning is a choice to attendee, on Teams instance but not if viewed on browser	No live captioning	Live captioning set by organizer and a 5-step process to set it up
On-demand	Only host can record. Recording is immediately downloadable through Stream. Stream also auto closed captions the recording.	Attendees can record for own use. No auto-captioning	Only host can record. Auto-uploaded to YouTube. No auto-captioning
Privacy	Option to join with shown email or join anonymously Attendee report to host excludes attendee emails if “joining anonymously”	Join with chosen name, option to remain anonymous Attendee report to host contains attendee emails	Join with existing YouTube profile, no option to be anonymous Analytics report doesn’t capture individual attendee date

Gotta say... Teams Live is my go-to for privacy and accessibility standards, while Zoom is my go-to for quick turnarounds and interactivity.

Once I shared this out with the rest of my team, a few other suggestions came back:

how about virtual reality meeting rooms instead of just webcam, like AltVR that Cassie recommended.
Em recommended bringing in a human live translator to help with caption accuracy which makes a world of difference to those with different needs.
and a good reminder from Mary, who's based in China, that there are other platforms that different countries use, as connectivity of a single platform isn't always consistent from country-to-country. Saw this pretty good article on video conferencing options in China for example.

How was the actual experience?

Some learnings and tips/tricks:

Get a great moderator - someone who is welcoming and can foster an engaging and open atmosphere online. Min from Singapore JS did a great job making attendees feel at ease to unmute and ask questions. She continued with their usual open mic, leaving 30 mins at the start of the call for folks to eat their dinner together, say hi and say what they wanted to get out of the session
Focus on on-demand as well - so realistically, you can expect a ~70% drop out rate to virtual meetups, from your initial registration numbers. That's okay. We saw a x2 uplift in viewers from our on-demand content, within a week. Recommend having a think about where your on-demand content will sit, how accessible it will be to rest of community and maybe how you want to drive awareness of great content sitting online. For example, the Singapore JS meetup partnered with a local on-demand developer content repository, Engineers.SG . This was perfect because they have an existing audience on their site already, so the content was easily accessible to the JS community AND reached new audiences on Engineers.SG platform.
Invite an overseas expert - this is both a push and pull reason. The pull is that you bring new expertise to local audiences, which you can't do as easily with in-person events. The push is that you want to ensure you have a good value proposition for why local audiences should spend their evening logged onto your meetup, rather than meet the local speaker another day. And remember to be kind about timezone accommodations. (Mini shoutout! For keeping the promise to communities, and dialing in at 6am/up to 12am, my teammates are the best Aaron Powell, Shayne Boyer, Henk, Laurent <3)
Virtual works best with niche audiences, I think - comparing across the 3 meetups, the topics that were more focused/in-depth, got higher engagement. This is also because their audience was also more well-versed with the topic (around level 200 content). The number of questions doubled the questions from meetups where topics were more generic and level 100. It's a really good value prop for folks to tune in for a chance to ask all the questions they want to.
It sets the tone for a remote relationship to form with overseas experts - this one mostly applies to DevRel folks in a global team. If you want to better integrate local audiences into your team's global activities, which lessens the time spent on deep localization of everything...you'll love how virtual meetups make it so much easier for your overseas expert to start connecting with local audiences. Simply put, at an in-person event, a speaker has time to meet a max of 5 people during pizza time VS at a virtual event, 15 people can direct message the speaker on a question or start saying hi on social and the relationship continues from there.
Include carbon savings into success measures - we saved approximately 35 metric tons of carbon, by dialing instead of flying in 4 speakers from around the world. That's something! And by measuring carbon savings from this experiment, you set good foundation for virtual meetups to become more of a norm as a long-term green initiative, even after this pandemic fades out. Here'sthe calculator I used. For further reading on Green initiatives in tech, ClimateAction.tech is a great community to join too.

Part 3 on first-party conferences

As I write this piece on meetups, my team and I have been planning for a first-party virtual conference that's finally taking place on March 7th, join us to check it out https://aka.ms/techcommunityonlineapac. Post-that, I'll write the final piece for this series ✌🏻

All the best folks! Please stay safe, and for those affected wishing you the best health. And remember, toilet paper hoarding will not solve anything 🧻

Community management in a crisis

Sarah Thiam — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 10:03:12 +0000

It's February 2020 and the coronavirus (CV) pandemic is a WHO-declared global emergency and my home Singapore recently entered DORScon Orange which is a national threat level, declaring medium to high public impact of the virus.

Context

In order of number of confirmed cases, China tops the list (64K), followed by Japan (252) and Singapore (58). As I write this, I truly convey my heartfelt concern for Asia’s duress and those affected during this period.

In terms of Cases : Population : Land Mass, there's a 8x higher chance of contracting the virus in Singapore as compared to China. And this has led to the cancellation of many community activities, exhausting communication of all last-minute changes and stressfully fast turnarounds to move things online.

In my own press for time, I searched online for a quick fix on how others manage community in a crisis like this. But found close to zero information.

So I’m writing this article, to contribute to references for community managers affected by COVID-19 in 2020 or future crisis. Imo, there are 2 phases in this: PHASE ONE is to address the sudden crisis and unravel any plans you’ve made for time-sensitive activities, PHASE TWO is to make alternative plans for those activities, for example how to turn in-person activities online. This article addresses PHASE ONE.

Hope this helps reduce cognitive load if you're a community manager like me, and help create better understanding and empathy if you're far from this but have teammates going through it.

First and foremost, I want to stress that we need to talk about BOTH psychological AND physical safety because the former takes an invisible toll and is much less tended to, despite being equally important.

So, what happens to community management in a pandemic?

I’ve distilled my experience into a few realities and lessons below. For context, I was faced with a huge 2000-person conference booked in by my company and 7 peripheral community events planned around it.

Reality #1: there isn't much guidance on how DevRel/community should operate in a pandemic. Given that DevRel is not simply events, the way you respond to it will need to differ from what your Events Team or PR team is doing. For example, I realised that I couldn't send out a broad email with a singular well-crafted message like other mass conferences could. In community, relationships supersede operations. I had to individually reach out to each community to address their comfort level of continuing activities because it’s a partnership and I can’t decide without a consensus.
Reality #2: External communities may not prioritize the same way that you do. This might be extremely uncomfortable to say because it implies that someone here is not mindful enough of others’ safety and that the other is paranoid (pick your end of the spectrum). In reality, I had a fair mix of communities proactively planning to shift it online and others who preferred to see-how and cancel a few days only if absolutely necessary.
Reality #3: (this one is tougher) Your internal team may also not prioritize the same way that you do. Again, there is no right or wrong. In my reality, my global team’s priorities were influenced by other activities happening in other parts of the world, business priorities and the threat level presented within their local environment and more. Asia’s COVID-19 crisis wasn’t the only kind of crisis happening around the world and I learnt to better extend my empathy.

OK, what's the right response for community organizers?

Now I’ll share my lessons learnt that are actionable steps you can refer to, to reduce cognitive load if something sudden like this happens to you as well.
Again, there is no right or wrong, it's just what worked for me / what i felt was right.

Lesson #1: Touch base with fellow community organizers. My lesson learnt was not to come in full strength with a decision made in my head on what next steps needed to be taken. Communities are partners and need space to give input. My suggestion is to drop a personal message in a safe space (e.g. not a mass email thread which can be socially pressurizing) asking if they are comfortable and keep it open-ended to what they want to do about the meetup. If they ask for your suggestions, come ready with a few options.
Lesson #2: Sometimes a crisis takes a while to become full blown. In the escalation period before that, it can be a confusing time to decide when is the right time to ring the alarm. My suggestion is to plan early with your community on a backup plan + set a date that you will make the call by. This relieves a TON of stress. It kinda lets you take control of when to panic lol. Up to here, the next steps form a pretty open-ended conversation with you communities. However, I advise that you always prioritize being human over being good at your job and emphasize SAFETY FIRST. I know I said not to be pushy above, but I'd say find a firm way to stand by this prioritization. Even with communities that want to continue with their events, suggest ways to minimize risk of spread e.g. no communal food and putting travel declaration forms in place.
Lesson #3: Use a few factors to decide with your community on when is the right time to ring the alarm. You don’t have to wait for the government of W.H.O. to decide if something is unsafe. If you feel unsafe or anxious, some of your community probably already feels that way and since psychological safety is really important, you need to find an appropriate time to ring the alarm. Consider A) on-ground sentiment and the community’s aggregate response B) aligning with your company’s direction on it C) national and global official emergency levels D) poll your participants which is the most direct and useful.
Lesson #4: Communicate actively with your audience / community to give peace of mind. The psychological stress of them sitting there wondering if the event they signed up for is going to be safe or not, what will happen etc is VERY REAL. Be super clear to them and don’t hesitate to over-communicate especially if the situation is changing day-by-day. Add a note on the meetup board, send email notifications or leave a note on your social if most are tuned in there.

As I write about this in real time, I’m now at the point where communications have been made to cancel most in-person activities. PHASE TWO is next where next steps are to figure out how to re-purpose plans into safer channels e.g. online meetups, on-demand videos, social and more. Will share that in Coronavirus lessons part 2 soon, successful or not.

Wish me luck!