By Victoria Morgan-Smith
Having “written the book” on how and why to run an Internal Tech Conference, I started the year with plans for running masterclasses and talking at lots of events to spread the word about the book. Then COVID-19 hit, and suddenly all events were being cancelled - those we were planning to attend, as well as those our book had inspired. In this post, I’ll explore how the pandemic has shaped tech conferences in general and internal tech conferences in particular. Successful online events have had a significant positive impact and it is clear that now, more than ever, organizations need internal conferences to help their workforce thrive in a remote-first world.
A difficult year, 2020 has also been a fascinating study of the Kubler-Ross change curve, as people have shifted from cancelling events, to attempting virtual alternatives, dealing with Zoom fatigue, through to prolonged remote working leading to a real craving for human connection.,.
The Kuebler-Ross model of change - source: https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-kubler-ross-change-curve/
With an eye to internal conferences, I’ve been watching what the public conference space has chronicled through the year as a source of learning on how to adapt internally.
SHOCK & DENIAL: Disaster has struck, hit the pause button!
When the pandemic hit, with social distancing, lockdowns, and no clear end in sight, public and private events around the world were being postponed “for a couple of months”. For example, I was due to run a masterclass on Internal Tech Conferences at SenseConf (run by Conflux), then scheduled for April 2020. At this point in time, we thought that this bizarre situation couldn’t possibly last long, so it was just a matter of a small postponement.
FRUSTRATION: Cancel everything
A couple of months later it became clear that lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions were likely to be common for for much of the year, and so postponed events became cancelled altogether. Public events organisations were aghast, and at the Financial Times (where I work) we tried very hard not to think about our internal tech conference scheduled for later in the year.
DEPRESSION: A digital event is just not the same
As people struggled to connect day-to-day while working remotely, they held tightly to the belief that the essence of events lay in the immediacy and accessibility of colocation and initial appetites to replace physical events with digital ones were low.
However, some companies who had already gone online with their events started to share their experience to help inspire people to adapt. Ian Landsman’s article about Laracon’s annual online conference is a great example of this, with lots of advice for taking your day of conference talks and running them online instead of in person. For Laracon and their public events, the initial appeal of online conferences was the ability to reach a wider audience.
An online event not only lowers the cost but also helps those who may not feel comfortable at a large in-person conference, as well as those who may be physically disabled and could not otherwise attend.
For an internal conference, this translates to a potential levelling of the playing field when it comes to including members of remote offices - if everyone is online, then the only real barrier to global inclusion is timezones. As we came to realise at the Financial Times, another boost to the spirit of inclusion is that getting live captioning for talks is a lot more straightforward when they are all being filmed by default.
EXPERIMENTATION: Giving it a go
By May 2020, “normality” was still not in sight, and so events organisations started to experiment. At this stage, this mostly meant following a typical day of scheduled talks, streaming them online, whilst trying to find ways to recreate the physical space digitally as much as possible. An example I particularly enjoyed was Agile Manchester. These conference organisers always find ways to add lots of “finishing touches” to an event to help it feel special, so here they established a virtual lobby that included a cafe where you could find recipes for delicious desserts (not quite the same as actually eating them, but a nice touch nonetheless!)
Conferences aside, people started finding creative ways to share a space during meetings (such as meeting in an online computer game), and companies started to run hack days, quizzes and other social events to keep up the connections with colleagues.
DECISION: Learning how to do digital events better
By July 2020, there had been several successful digital events. People were starting to learn what was needed to make these work, and to see digital events as opportunities for extra value, such as making recorded talks available for viewing afterwards. Not only is this useful for enabling people to go at their own pace, it’s also great for those of us who experience “FOMO” (fear of missing out) whenever being forced to choose between two talks being given simultaneously.
After experiencing several online events, my co-author Matthew Skelton had built up a sense of some things that worked well and wrote up some best practices. In summary, he says:
The key to good online conferences is interaction with speaker and attendees
Pre-recorded talks help to avoid the need for expensive broadcast technology
Speakers need training and mentoring in giving online talks - and some new equipment
Live-streaming talks exclude people in less wealthy regions
By this time Zoom fatigue was setting in. Working from home was exhausting, and working practices across the globe were being reviewed: companies that had started out trying to mimic the office routines were now looking for ways to adapt to a different style of working.
It followed then, that the same must apply to conferences. Online events are great, but they couldn’t simply be a case of having eight hours of talks being streamed back to back over Zoom. It doesn’t matter how good your home-baked snacks are, this was just too much.
In recognising this, Redgate Software’s annual Level Up conference in September became Level Up Week - a themed week of talks and workshops spread out across 5 days that would feel more sustainable than a day full of on-screen calls. They found huge levels of engagement with the approach, and at a time when everyone is scattered, Redgater Chris Smith says “I can’t explain how lovely it was to log into the first session of the event, and scan across the pages and pages of Redgaters, smiling and ready to take part in Level Up Week together”.
INTEGRATION: It’s about connection, and creating opportunities for conversation
As the year 2020 draws to a close, one thing has become abundantly clear: we are all craving connection with other people. The previous opportunities to meet people in person and have a conversation about your craft or your industry with colleagues outside from your immediate team have vanished.
The need for internal conferences is greater than ever before: - the connections, the peer-learning, the sharing of practices and knowledge - all that has taken a huge hit this year. People starting new jobs have never met their immediate colleagues in person, and often have not even spoken to anyone outside of their own team.
We stated at the start of our book Internal Tech Conferences that deciding the purpose of your event would be the key to determining the format, and this year’s Engine Room conference at the Financial Times illustrated that beautifully. In previous years I helped to run this event, so I took a keen interest in how the organizers responded to the pandemic. Their goal this year was primarily to build connections, to create a space for conversation. There was some education, some idea-sparking, but even more than that, there was a need for simply sharing a space with our wider community at Financial Times.
Sarah Wells tells the story of the 2020 Engine Room conference very well:
We already knew that technical conferences had changed the way they did things when they switched to online, running shorter talks with longer Q&A, and running for a shorter time overall — maybe 4 hours rather than a full 9 to 5.
Screenshot from the 2020 Engine Room conference at Financial Times - used with permission.
By the end of this event I’d heard some amusing engineering horror stories that reminded me of my own cringe-worthy events back in my code-writing days, I’d learned how to whittle a shape from a wooden stick, and I’d joined a discussion about onboarding new team members in remote times. I have to agree that in terms of having a clear goal and delivering on it, this year’s event was, as someone fed back, “the best one ever”.
Sarah Wells’ key learnings for online internal tech conferences from FT’s Engine Room 2020 are:
Use the tools people are familiar with: don’t add unnecessary cognitive load
Keep it shorter and sharper: it’s harder to hold people’s attention remotely
Create space for hanging out: people don’t get much chance to interact beyond their team right now
As ever, strive for inclusivity
2021 - Beyond Tech conferences
In 2021, the FT plans to run internal conferences for other disciplines and departments - who says this is just about technology conferences? All sorts of teams are now missing those water cooler conversations and incidental opportunities for longer conversations, for sharing experiences and learning together. I expect that many other organizations will begin to see the value of taking inspiration from internal tech conferences and applying the principles in other areas.