October 5, 2016 at 17:01JUG.ru Group inner kitchen: how to make a conference for 1000 programmers
It might seem that everything about the conference is clear from the outside: they are made just for people to come and watch. But what is visible to the audience is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many unobvious moments. What is behind the organization of a major IT conference? We decided to show the “inner kitchen” of the JUG.ru Group , starting from the numbers of Joker 2016 .
You can try to guess these numbers, and then look under the habrakat and find out their real values (sometimes rounded, because the work is not finished yet):
It would seem that what to do in a whole year? Especially considering that the JUG.ru Group annually makes more than 10 conferences - that is, when they start to engage in one, many of the deadlines are much closer. But there are important reasons to start so early.
Alexei 23derevo Fedorov , Director of the JUG.ru Group: “If you want to make an event for 500+ people with several rooms, then in St. Petersburg and Moscow you are immediately limited to several venues. If from 1000 people, in Moscow there are only Crocus and the World Trade Center, and in St. Petersburg - ExpoForum and Lenexpo.
As we grow, there are fewer suitable sites, and it’s more difficult to adapt to their free dates. But this was a big problem before, when we turned to the sites for three months, and everything was already booked. And now we are trying to book for the year, and it became easier.
Another reason is popular speakers. Foreign stars performing keynotes around the world have a long schedule ahead. As a result, it came to a situation when in winter we agreed with the speaker for the spring of next year . ”
The fact that it takes time to prepare a good conference program is clear to everyone. But at the same time, specific numbers can be much less obvious: why so much?
Andrey real_ales Dmitriev , Joker 2016 Program Director, explains: “Each report is reviewed. This is a meeting for an hour and a half: an hour a person speaks, another half an hour we throw his comments. The reviewer has the speaker himself and from one to five reviewers. If we assume that on average there are four people, then this is 6 person hours per review. In total, we have 52 reports in the Joker program. And some of them are reviewed several times.
In addition, we have a training for speakers for 16 hours, where 10 people are present. And also short online trainings. In total, 600 people is a rough average estimate for everything. ”
Compared to the Joker 2015, which was held at the Park Inn Pulkovskaya Hotel, the new one at ExpoForum has almost three times the large area. This complicates the task: when you can get lost on the site, you have to pay much more attention to navigation. But even with smaller sizes, working with the site is not just “concluding a lease agreement”, many more questions arise.
Ekaterina Kurilova, the executive director of the JUG.ru Group, burst out in a monologue about them in one breath: “There’s a whole stream of approvals:“ what size your stand is, let's stand here, no, it’s better to go there, and which wires will be used and which electricity, to whom there are many sockets, and we have a fire exit here, and here a fire entrance, but don’t put it here, oh my God, and from what stands, what material ”, you need to send fire safety certificates for at least KM3 level , draw a connection diagram, a passage diagram of a human sweat ka, the layout of the interactive layout, the scheme of security posts, the scheme adapted for participants indicating the toilets for the disabled, help points, feeding places and other things, the scheme of the schemes of all the schemes, and the engineering plan in AutoCAD above, send the per-minute timing, reconcile everything between platform
An ordinary viewer may ask “why bring equipment at all”: do the sites really have their own? Even at ExpoForum? If something specific is missing there, why not bring just that, and not complicate your life with the installation of several tons? And what generally weighs so much?
Ivan jetliner Dolgov, Technical Director: “At sites, especially hotels, our own equipment is often ten years out of date. And with ExpoForum, it’s a little different: it was built recently, but we have a large-scale conference for six rooms plus a party, we won’t be able to limit ourselves to the available ones. And in order not to take one from some, the other from others, and then mess around with conflicts, we just take everything in one place. They have already been burned ten times, so we love proven solutions and are skeptical about new contractors.
Why does everything weigh so much? Firstly, online broadcasting alone requires a bunch of equipment, we recently wrote about it . I would like to mention separately that computers for it come in protective cases, and there the computer itself can weigh 10 kilograms, and its case - 20.
There are heavy things like projectors. The projector itself for a large hall weighs 50 kilograms, and in a frame of iron pipes, which adds the same amount, the four of us usually carry it all together. The projector is placed on a structure more than two meters high, and so that all this does not catch on to the audience, it must be strong and massive. Each room has at least a projector, plus spare ones.
About 40 people participated in the building before, and at Joker 2016 there will probably be 50: those guys who brought the equipment and will put it on. This is a bunch of handmade, all with bolts, rivets. 50 people, 6 tons of equipment and up to 10 hours of development - and this is only preliminary work, without that during the conference itself. ”
It may seem that the work of speakers and work with speakers is limited to the preparation of reports. But at Joker 2016, out of 40 speakers, only 13 will be Petersburg - that is, with all the others, the question arises of their movement. And in some cases, this means an 18-hour flight with a transfer: the speaker manages to spend a lot of energy on the conference even before he is in place.
And when everyone lands, Tatyana Mammadovashe has to coordinate so many actions that she recalls her maiden name Captain: “Previously, difficult situations arose: the speaker disappeared somewhere, the hotel was stupid with providing a room, there were delays in excursions. Therefore, we understood from experience that complete control was needed. The speakers are met at the airport, put in a car, taken to a hotel, another person meets there, leads to the reception and settles. By the end of the day, a full report on the speakers should be ready: have everyone arrived, have baggage been lost, how are you feeling?
The day before the conference, the equipment is being tested; speakers and laptops must be delivered to the venue to it. And also an excursion, before her all phoned everyone with the question “have you changed your mind about going on an excursion”. And also speaker dinner, to clarify in front of him. In general, you feel like a nanny! ”
As you know, everyone hates marketers, and especially programmers. How to approach the marketing of an IT conference in such a situation?
Marketer Ruslan ARG89 Akhmetzyanov : “Nobody likes when they put in a hat on him. Therefore, the only reasonable option is not to do this, but to give people useful content. We publish on Habré such interviews which are of value in themselves, apart from the conference. And in the end, we just inform you: since you are so interested in it that you read up to this place, you might be interested in an event where there will be a lot of useful content.
In addition to the habr, we use more traditional advertising (for example, targeted on social networks), but we also try to make it interesting. Everyone’s liked the recent banner with Shipilev, “I’m optimizing,” I liked it so much that people, seeing it, put it on Twitter themselves .
The problem of my work: it is difficult to track which of my actions led to attending the conference. If other marketers can understand through cookies that a person bought something after reading their text, then we have 70% of corporate ticket sales, and it turns out like this: first a person reads and clicks something, and then a completely different person from another computer acquires for him a ticket. How to understand that these actions are related?
For some reason, marketers usually think that they are the smartest and don’t understand that they need to speak the same language with the audience. A typical mistake of a marketer (recently happened to me): “Java code is needed for advertising, but I don’t remember how it is designed, well, I’ll write it there somehow, no one will notice the difference.” Notice! "
Although the conference lasts two days, the volunteers participating in it need to devote as many as five to it: they undergo special training, participate in the development day and continue to work after the official closure. What makes people give so much time and effort not for money?
Ekaterina Kurilova : “The motivation of different volunteers is different. Some of them are programming, so they like to join the hangout of experienced developers and access to the conference videos is important. He who is smart can even find a job on the sidelines. But there are not IT, they need certificates of volunteering (they are useful for universities), team work experience, training and a general feeling of movement. Now, for Joker 2016, I came up with a new promotion for them in the form of special t-shirts that no one else will have - Limited Edition, as they say.
Relations with the volunteers have already developed: we do not just throw a cry to them before the event and forget about them after it, but invest in them. As a result, we got initiative people who not only participate on the site, but even help to search for new speakers and write texts, their activity has seriously expanded. They invest a lot, we are very grateful to them for this.
Well, at Joker 2016, volunteers even fly to St. Petersburg from Moscow, Novosibirsk and Sochi! ”
The person who comes to the conference to listen to the intricacies of the JVM can think about the design as a last resort: well, yes, the conference has a logo, but did the designer still have to work on something?
Designer Anton Filyov knows what there is: “With the Joker 2016 program alone, you have to tinker with it, because it has as many as 6 rooms, not including expert zones. How to make a paper program out of this so that it is not a huge poster? In addition to the program, for each conference, the designer is required to work on something else:
In general, you don’t have to get bored: the work continues even when the event itself has already ended. ”
The Joker website has all the necessary background information - for example, a description of each report. But you may feel that you don’t have to work with the text in the JUG.ru Group: the report description is short and the speaker sends it - just grab it and put it on the site, what’s the job?
Yana yegelletezeta Pilyugina explains the following: “Before getting to the site, each description went through editing: I corrected spelling, grammar, punctuation and other omissions, in some cases I rewrote a little. It led everything to one style: from replacing the first person with the third (we never write “I” in the descriptions) to the same long dashes instead of hyphens and the like.
And besides this, I translated the text for the English version of the site. And so for each of the reports, and at Joker 2016 there are more than 40 of them.
In addition to the descriptions of the reports, the site has biographies of speakers. And the FAQ. And Call For Papers. And just information about the conference. And all sorts of little things. And all this is also in two languages. It’s not necessary to write all this from scratch for each conference, but you have to edit it.
And as a result, it turns out that each specific task looks small, and in total a lot of them are recruited. ”
When you constantly deal with developers, you take over their habits. Therefore, work tasks become tickets in JIRA. It turned out that this tool, originally created as a bug tracker and often used to manage IT projects, is also great for organizing conferences.
However, our team also has its own developer, Maxim Zverev . He clarified the details of how everything is arranged: “Thanks to a small self-written stray, when someone submits an application for a report through the conference website, it automatically becomes a ticket in JIRA - very convenient. In the future, we want to add the opposite: so that as soon as the ticket passes a certain stage, meaning “the report received in the program received a description”, this description was automatically posted on the site.
We are now creating sites usingMetalsmith , and for the backend, Contentful is used . In addition to JIRA, we use other tools from Atlassian: Confluence, HipChat. The rest is standard: Google mail, Adobe’s Adobe package, and so on.
We work all for the Mac, but one person in the team installed Windows on the MacBook, claiming that it was more convenient for him. Who could it be ? ”
More recently, the ranks of the JUG.ru Group were replenished with new employees, but before that the entire staff consisted of the people listed in this text. And in order for a small number of people to perform a large number of tasks, maximum coordination of actions is required - and the organization of this process becomes an important task.
Ekaterina Kurilova : “I am engaged in operational activities, building business processes in the company.
So far, I have not yet fully gone in this direction, because once upon a time, when three guys-programmers gathered and I, besides strategic tasks, had a lot of urgent things. You just had to make a conference, and there was nobody besides the four of us. Then everything fell on me that did not concern marketing, which Alexey was engaged in, the program committee, which Andrey was engaged in, and Vani's work with equipment.
Gradually, we began to recruit a team, and I began to delegate tasks to new colleagues, training them: first I did the work myself, then I built an algorithm that was sewn into the business process, and this business process was transferred to another person. I exhaled and took on the next direction, but remaining a curator for what was given. So a small team can gradually grow from 12 conferences a year to 50 and not suffer from it, because all processes are worked out and systematized.
I’m not ready to give only volunteers. I appreciate their trust, I don’t want to scatter them as consumables, and I’m going to make our cooperation even more interesting for them. ”
In conclusion, we note: since it turned out to be so interesting to you that you read up to this place, then Joker itself may be of interest to you .
But this is only one of our conferences: in December, Moscow DotNext , Heisenbag and HolyJS will follow .
PS from 23derevo : Habr, and recommend a good targetologist to us? And then targeting and remarketing is our headache. If you know the good - write to me in PM. We will not stay in debt.
You can try to guess these numbers, and then look under the habrakat and find out their real values (sometimes rounded, because the work is not finished yet):
- Duration for which preparation began
- The number of human hours spent on the program
- The total area of the conference rooms
- Total speaker flight time
- Weight of equipment to be brought to the site
- Volunteer working hours at the conference
- The volume of the layout files of one of the sponsor stands
- The total number of views of the Habraposts associated with the conference
- The volume of text on the conference website
- Number of tickets in JIRA
- The number of members of the JUG.ru Group team
1 year: the period for which preparation begins
It would seem that what to do in a whole year? Especially considering that the JUG.ru Group annually makes more than 10 conferences - that is, when they start to engage in one, many of the deadlines are much closer. But there are important reasons to start so early.
Alexei 23derevo Fedorov , Director of the JUG.ru Group: “If you want to make an event for 500+ people with several rooms, then in St. Petersburg and Moscow you are immediately limited to several venues. If from 1000 people, in Moscow there are only Crocus and the World Trade Center, and in St. Petersburg - ExpoForum and Lenexpo.As we grow, there are fewer suitable sites, and it’s more difficult to adapt to their free dates. But this was a big problem before, when we turned to the sites for three months, and everything was already booked. And now we are trying to book for the year, and it became easier.
Another reason is popular speakers. Foreign stars performing keynotes around the world have a long schedule ahead. As a result, it came to a situation when in winter we agreed with the speaker for the spring of next year . ”
About 600 hours: time for the Joker 2016 program
The fact that it takes time to prepare a good conference program is clear to everyone. But at the same time, specific numbers can be much less obvious: why so much?
Andrey real_ales Dmitriev , Joker 2016 Program Director, explains: “Each report is reviewed. This is a meeting for an hour and a half: an hour a person speaks, another half an hour we throw his comments. The reviewer has the speaker himself and from one to five reviewers. If we assume that on average there are four people, then this is 6 person hours per review. In total, we have 52 reports in the Joker program. And some of them are reviewed several times.In addition, we have a training for speakers for 16 hours, where 10 people are present. And also short online trainings. In total, 600 people is a rough average estimate for everything. ”
About 4,000 square meters: Joker Square 2016
Compared to the Joker 2015, which was held at the Park Inn Pulkovskaya Hotel, the new one at ExpoForum has almost three times the large area. This complicates the task: when you can get lost on the site, you have to pay much more attention to navigation. But even with smaller sizes, working with the site is not just “concluding a lease agreement”, many more questions arise.
Ekaterina Kurilova, the executive director of the JUG.ru Group, burst out in a monologue about them in one breath: “There’s a whole stream of approvals:“ what size your stand is, let's stand here, no, it’s better to go there, and which wires will be used and which electricity, to whom there are many sockets, and we have a fire exit here, and here a fire entrance, but don’t put it here, oh my God, and from what stands, what material ”, you need to send fire safety certificates for at least KM3 level , draw a connection diagram, a passage diagram of a human sweat ka, the layout of the interactive layout, the scheme of security posts, the scheme adapted for participants indicating the toilets for the disabled, help points, feeding places and other things, the scheme of the schemes of all the schemes, and the engineering plan in AutoCAD above, send the per-minute timing, reconcile everything between platformOver 6 tons: the total weight of equipment brought to Joker 2016
An ordinary viewer may ask “why bring equipment at all”: do the sites really have their own? Even at ExpoForum? If something specific is missing there, why not bring just that, and not complicate your life with the installation of several tons? And what generally weighs so much?
Ivan jetliner Dolgov, Technical Director: “At sites, especially hotels, our own equipment is often ten years out of date. And with ExpoForum, it’s a little different: it was built recently, but we have a large-scale conference for six rooms plus a party, we won’t be able to limit ourselves to the available ones. And in order not to take one from some, the other from others, and then mess around with conflicts, we just take everything in one place. They have already been burned ten times, so we love proven solutions and are skeptical about new contractors. Why does everything weigh so much? Firstly, online broadcasting alone requires a bunch of equipment, we recently wrote about it . I would like to mention separately that computers for it come in protective cases, and there the computer itself can weigh 10 kilograms, and its case - 20.
There are heavy things like projectors. The projector itself for a large hall weighs 50 kilograms, and in a frame of iron pipes, which adds the same amount, the four of us usually carry it all together. The projector is placed on a structure more than two meters high, and so that all this does not catch on to the audience, it must be strong and massive. Each room has at least a projector, plus spare ones.
About 40 people participated in the building before, and at Joker 2016 there will probably be 50: those guys who brought the equipment and will put it on. This is a bunch of handmade, all with bolts, rivets. 50 people, 6 tons of equipment and up to 10 hours of development - and this is only preliminary work, without that during the conference itself. ”
350 hours: total flight time for Joker 2016 speakers (round trip)
It may seem that the work of speakers and work with speakers is limited to the preparation of reports. But at Joker 2016, out of 40 speakers, only 13 will be Petersburg - that is, with all the others, the question arises of their movement. And in some cases, this means an 18-hour flight with a transfer: the speaker manages to spend a lot of energy on the conference even before he is in place.
And when everyone lands, Tatyana Mammadovashe has to coordinate so many actions that she recalls her maiden name Captain: “Previously, difficult situations arose: the speaker disappeared somewhere, the hotel was stupid with providing a room, there were delays in excursions. Therefore, we understood from experience that complete control was needed. The speakers are met at the airport, put in a car, taken to a hotel, another person meets there, leads to the reception and settles. By the end of the day, a full report on the speakers should be ready: have everyone arrived, have baggage been lost, how are you feeling? The day before the conference, the equipment is being tested; speakers and laptops must be delivered to the venue to it. And also an excursion, before her all phoned everyone with the question “have you changed your mind about going on an excursion”. And also speaker dinner, to clarify in front of him. In general, you feel like a nanny! ”
235,000: the total number of views of hubposts associated with Joker 2016
As you know, everyone hates marketers, and especially programmers. How to approach the marketing of an IT conference in such a situation?
Marketer Ruslan ARG89 Akhmetzyanov : “Nobody likes when they put in a hat on him. Therefore, the only reasonable option is not to do this, but to give people useful content. We publish on Habré such interviews which are of value in themselves, apart from the conference. And in the end, we just inform you: since you are so interested in it that you read up to this place, you might be interested in an event where there will be a lot of useful content.In addition to the habr, we use more traditional advertising (for example, targeted on social networks), but we also try to make it interesting. Everyone’s liked the recent banner with Shipilev, “I’m optimizing,” I liked it so much that people, seeing it, put it on Twitter themselves .
The problem of my work: it is difficult to track which of my actions led to attending the conference. If other marketers can understand through cookies that a person bought something after reading their text, then we have 70% of corporate ticket sales, and it turns out like this: first a person reads and clicks something, and then a completely different person from another computer acquires for him a ticket. How to understand that these actions are related?
For some reason, marketers usually think that they are the smartest and don’t understand that they need to speak the same language with the audience. A typical mistake of a marketer (recently happened to me): “Java code is needed for advertising, but I don’t remember how it is designed, well, I’ll write it there somehow, no one will notice the difference.” Notice! "
5 working days: volunteer working hours at Joker 2016
Although the conference lasts two days, the volunteers participating in it need to devote as many as five to it: they undergo special training, participate in the development day and continue to work after the official closure. What makes people give so much time and effort not for money?
Ekaterina Kurilova : “The motivation of different volunteers is different. Some of them are programming, so they like to join the hangout of experienced developers and access to the conference videos is important. He who is smart can even find a job on the sidelines. But there are not IT, they need certificates of volunteering (they are useful for universities), team work experience, training and a general feeling of movement. Now, for Joker 2016, I came up with a new promotion for them in the form of special t-shirts that no one else will have - Limited Edition, as they say.Relations with the volunteers have already developed: we do not just throw a cry to them before the event and forget about them after it, but invest in them. As a result, we got initiative people who not only participate on the site, but even help to search for new speakers and write texts, their activity has seriously expanded. They invest a lot, we are very grateful to them for this.
Well, at Joker 2016, volunteers even fly to St. Petersburg from Moscow, Novosibirsk and Sochi! ”
3.1 GB: the size of one of the layouts of sponsorship stands for Joker 2016
The person who comes to the conference to listen to the intricacies of the JVM can think about the design as a last resort: well, yes, the conference has a logo, but did the designer still have to work on something?
Designer Anton Filyov knows what there is: “With the Joker 2016 program alone, you have to tinker with it, because it has as many as 6 rooms, not including expert zones. How to make a paper program out of this so that it is not a huge poster? In addition to the program, for each conference, the designer is required to work on something else:- "Stubs" for each report
- Site layout
- Site Signs
- Press Walls
- Brand wall
- Bracelets for lunch
- Sticker
- Souvenir
- Sponsorship Stands
- Print banners
- Internet banners
- Images on the site
- Workbook at the end of the conference
In general, you don’t have to get bored: the work continues even when the event itself has already ended. ”
Over 100,000 characters: the amount of text on the Joker website
The Joker website has all the necessary background information - for example, a description of each report. But you may feel that you don’t have to work with the text in the JUG.ru Group: the report description is short and the speaker sends it - just grab it and put it on the site, what’s the job?
Yana yegelletezeta Pilyugina explains the following: “Before getting to the site, each description went through editing: I corrected spelling, grammar, punctuation and other omissions, in some cases I rewrote a little. It led everything to one style: from replacing the first person with the third (we never write “I” in the descriptions) to the same long dashes instead of hyphens and the like.And besides this, I translated the text for the English version of the site. And so for each of the reports, and at Joker 2016 there are more than 40 of them.
In addition to the descriptions of the reports, the site has biographies of speakers. And the FAQ. And Call For Papers. And just information about the conference. And all sorts of little things. And all this is also in two languages. It’s not necessary to write all this from scratch for each conference, but you have to edit it.
And as a result, it turns out that each specific task looks small, and in total a lot of them are recruited. ”
694: number of tickets in JIRA by Joker 2016
When you constantly deal with developers, you take over their habits. Therefore, work tasks become tickets in JIRA. It turned out that this tool, originally created as a bug tracker and often used to manage IT projects, is also great for organizing conferences.
However, our team also has its own developer, Maxim Zverev . He clarified the details of how everything is arranged: “Thanks to a small self-written stray, when someone submits an application for a report through the conference website, it automatically becomes a ticket in JIRA - very convenient. In the future, we want to add the opposite: so that as soon as the ticket passes a certain stage, meaning “the report received in the program received a description”, this description was automatically posted on the site. We are now creating sites usingMetalsmith , and for the backend, Contentful is used . In addition to JIRA, we use other tools from Atlassian: Confluence, HipChat. The rest is standard: Google mail, Adobe’s Adobe package, and so on.
We work all for the Mac, but one person in the team installed Windows on the MacBook, claiming that it was more convenient for him. Who could it be ? ”
9 people: number of team members until recently
More recently, the ranks of the JUG.ru Group were replenished with new employees, but before that the entire staff consisted of the people listed in this text. And in order for a small number of people to perform a large number of tasks, maximum coordination of actions is required - and the organization of this process becomes an important task.
Ekaterina Kurilova : “I am engaged in operational activities, building business processes in the company.So far, I have not yet fully gone in this direction, because once upon a time, when three guys-programmers gathered and I, besides strategic tasks, had a lot of urgent things. You just had to make a conference, and there was nobody besides the four of us. Then everything fell on me that did not concern marketing, which Alexey was engaged in, the program committee, which Andrey was engaged in, and Vani's work with equipment.
Gradually, we began to recruit a team, and I began to delegate tasks to new colleagues, training them: first I did the work myself, then I built an algorithm that was sewn into the business process, and this business process was transferred to another person. I exhaled and took on the next direction, but remaining a curator for what was given. So a small team can gradually grow from 12 conferences a year to 50 and not suffer from it, because all processes are worked out and systematized.
I’m not ready to give only volunteers. I appreciate their trust, I don’t want to scatter them as consumables, and I’m going to make our cooperation even more interesting for them. ”
In conclusion, we note: since it turned out to be so interesting to you that you read up to this place, then Joker itself may be of interest to you .
But this is only one of our conferences: in December, Moscow DotNext , Heisenbag and HolyJS will follow .
PS from 23derevo : Habr, and recommend a good targetologist to us? And then targeting and remarketing is our headache. If you know the good - write to me in PM. We will not stay in debt.