Thread by @mattstratton, It's been a couple days since #DevOpsDays Chicago, and I wanted to [...]

It& #39;s been a couple days since #DevOpsDays Chicago, and I wanted to capture some of my thoughts about the event (background - I am one of the founders of the Chicago event, was one of the emcees/hosts of this iteration, and am a global core devopsdays team member) (a thread)

This spring, we had a tough decision to make - given COVID, do we cancel our event? Or pivot it to virtual? We spent about 4 weeks talking in-depth on this decision. It was not one we took lightly.

Participant experience is the cornerstone of #devopsdays Chicago. Our most important criteria for considering a virtual experience was "can we provide the interaction and community experience that is essential to the spirit of this event for our local community?"

When we were discussing this, I made the point that I did NOT want us to consider technology or event platforms, but instead focus on the outcomes we wanted. The focus was on the "art of the possible".

We discovered a lot of interesting things by thinking this way. A lot of "how we do things" at the event are do to the constraints of natural laws - for example, you can& #39;t move 600+ people in meatspace into breakout rooms every 20 minutes. But you can do that virtually!

Where that matters is that we didn& #39;t have to constrain ourselves to the "talks in the morning, open spaces in the afternoon". We could interleave them all day long, for example.

Also, it was okay (even encouraged) to have speakers and participants interact during the talk! In a "real life" talk, chatting with others about the talk while it& #39;s happening would be disruptive and rude.

In the virtual space, it& #39;s a feature, not a bug.

We spent a lot of time debating pre-recorded vs live talks. I could talk about this a lot more, and would love to. Here I& #39;ll summarize it in that we decided to do pre-recorded for three reasons (see next tweet as I ran out of characters):

1) Minimize day-of challenges with tech/network for speakers
2) Allow for speakers to interact during their talk
3) Provide very high quality production values, while also allowing speakers to present more naturally, not while sitting at a desk, etc

For all the speakers, we worked with them on their comfort/safety concerns, etc, but we facilitated them being professionally recorded in a studio. Given that speakers were not all local Chicago-based, this was a fun coordination task for our AV team!

Speakers who could not be recorded in a studio (various reasons; immunocompromised, comfort, locale, etc) we provided in-depth guidance on recording, and offered to provide high-end gear if needed (we didn& #39;t end up having to do that part, but it was there as an option)

We also decided very quickly on two things for the event:
1) it needed to be free for participants
2) We wanted there to be zero "registration gates" in order to view the talks/stream

We did require registration to participate in the interactive portion, mostly because we needed a way to communicate details to participants, but more because we needed to have the Code of Conduct be accepted for anyone participating.

We did end up putting up another Code of Conduct "gate" when you joined the participant experience, but at the time that we decided to open registration, we didn& #39;t know we would be doing it that way, so we kept the registration part.

I& #39;m going to write up a blog post in the next few days going into a lot of the details on how we produced the event; how we set up Discord, how AV/streaming/recording worked, etc, so I& #39;m going to gloss over all that for now.

First I want to talk about the content/speakers/talks.

Talk selection for #devopsdays is my favorite and least favorite part of the event! It& #39;s super challenging to get the balance we want, but it& #39;s also so energizing to do. Shout-out to @DivineOps who was our content chair.

Our speakers have all been a joy to work with on this very different experience, and I cannot stress enough how much I appreciate their enthusiasm, patience, and friendship through this experience. We had a few stumbles, but it was really fantastic to work with all of you.

Given the nature of online interactions, we knew that having moderators for the video breakout sessions was going to be key. So many amazing folks, including organizers of other #devopsdays worldwide, spent time and energy helping with this essential facet of the event.

Being an emcee/host of this event was a lot more challenging, logistics-wise, than the in-person events. Thank you to my fellow hosts, @DivineOps and @MargaretValtie for being so great!

I also really appreciate our sponsors for taking a chance with us in this new format. We definitely had some challenges, but we will keep trying to improve and iterate and hopefully, we can all learn together

The overall feedback I& #39;ve heard on #devopsdays Chicago 2020 was some form of this:

"I hate virtual events. I still hate them. But if we have to have them, I want them to be like this."

I couldn& #39;t agree more. Thank you to everyone who helped make this event special. I

https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="💜" title="Violettes Herz" aria-label="Emoji: Violettes Herz"> you all

I have a lot more thoughts about the event but I started to run out of steam writing this thread, so I& #39;ll add on over time :)

I will say this - if you enjoyed the streaming experience all day, including the fantastic talk videos, interstitial stuff like the dancing yak and @TheJewberwocky& #39;s DevOpsDeep Thoughts, give a shout out to our great AV team, especially @trevorghess and @kevinreedy !!!

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