Virtual Events Suck.

Thu, Dec 10, 2020

I mean, is this even up for argument?

Sweet Caroline

One of the whitest-ass things in the world is our people’s obsession with songs at sporting events, and indeed, in large crowds. If you’re reading this and you’re from Europe, feel free to replace my references to Sweet Caroline with Seven Nation Army, same diff. That said, you can fairly reliably trigger this behavior in most cultures in most parts of the world by finding a sufficiently rowdy bar around midnight and playing something on the jukebox that gets folks going. Humans, we’re social creatures, yeah? A few bars of Neil Diamond, a couple people singing along, and by the time you’re at ‘Hands, touching hands’ you’ll have a swelling crescendo that culminates in a ear-shattering and atonal screech of ‘SWEEEEEEEEEEEEET CAR-O-LINE (WOAH OH OH)’ making the bartenders silently plot the murder of everyone in their line of sight.

People like being around people, and most people don’t treat everyone around them as some sort of incredibly delicate faberge egg. There’s a lot of “wow look at all these accomodations people are making that disabled people have asked for now that nobody is supposed to leave their house! hypocrisy, much??” and I’m like, yeah, duh? Pointing out hypocrisy is the lowest form of engagement in 2020. This is why virtual events suck – because nobody is actually planning on doing them any longer than they need to.

Shameless Self-Promotion

One of the benefits of in-person conferences is that they temporarily remove you from your day-to-day work and immerse you in a community of like-minded individuals. It’s not just about getting to hear new ideas, but also about the break from your daily routine. This is one of the things that is hardest to replicate in a virtual event. DIDevOps was perhaps the most successful virtual conference I’ve seen in making their event feel like An Event. This event was clever and whimsical, the community was engaged, and it definitely didn’t feel like just another video call.

Rachel Stephens, RedMonk

I wrote earlier this year about the idea of a decisive moment and how that influenced the thinking behind Deserted Island DevOps. To elaborate a bit, Cartier-Bresson was a street photographer who coined this phrase in the introduction to his 1947 book.

Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.

What is, then, the ‘decisive moment’ of a tech conference? My original criteria was that an event was etherial or placeless; From the smallest DevOpsDays to the largest re:Invent, an event is defined less by the where than by the who. As an attendee, you are swept away from the status quo for a time (even as it inorexably pulls you back in, given the amount of people I see working on laptops during events) into a convention center or hotel or theater or whatever, specifically to focus on something other than what you normally would. Quite literally, you are being moved out of your comfort zone. This can prime you to accept ideas that normally you wouldn’t, can rejigger your brain chemistry for a few hours to make you see things from a different perspective. That’s valuable! As a speaker, you’re transported to a new stage, with a new audience, a new set of eyes and ears to reflect off of. It’s almost like being a comedian and testing out material – you try some new lines, some new jokes, add an anecdote here, shave one off there. Repetition builds mastery. Next week, or next month, you’re going to do it all again. Our traversal through the liminal spaces between these potemkin stages lends itself to inward focus where we must Do The Work to shut out the world around us. To be less floral about it, the demands of the road make us better speakers because the only way we don’t go fuckin’ mad is to focus on the work.

Virtual events offer none of this, unfortunately. As attendees, another Slack, another Zoom call, another wave of talking heads and PowerPoint. As speakers, our audience disappears behind a chat window. We lose our reflection. It’s sad and terrible and great for some people, but on the balance I think we dislike it more than we like it.

The bad is part of the fun! You can’t replicate the feeling of gnawing on an underripe banana while chugging overly-hot-but-not-terribly-flavorful coffee watching someone who’s company paid way too much for a keynote while mentally ticking off the people you need to talk to that day while working out the soreness in your back from the bed that isn’t yours that you got maybe four productive sleeping hours in due to jet lag while figuring out who you’re going to catch up with after the show wraps that day as you muse about how it looks like your competitors have a much nicer booth than yours, and you wonder if they’re hiring except that one asshole still works there and so on and so forth. “That sounds terrible!” you may be musing, and you’d be right, but I love the terrible. I thrive in the terrible. I’m drinking single origin fair trade coffee beans that were roasted in small batches locally brewed in a fancy coffee maker and I can tell you that when this is all over and I can have a cuppa brewed in the backroom of a Hilton it is going to be the sweetest thing I can possibly imagine for five seconds right before I start hating everything about it again and that’s fine.

The bad of an in-person event is terrible, but it’s a terrible I can work with. I go outside like once or twice a week now to get groceries and that’s all I’ve done for the past nine months. I want the workable terrible, not this horrific stasis.

Why Do Virtual Events Suck To Attend?

The reason that virtual events suck is that we’re trying to replicate in-person events. We’re doing old-school iOS skeumorphism but for primarily social gatherings. No wonder they suck! There’s a few broad reasons:

• Bad UX: Sometimes I like to style on babies by displaying object permanance, but you wouldn’t know that given the utter contempt event platforms seem to have for their audiences by doing dumb skeumorphic “conference halls” with badly ‘shopped people standing around.

• Pervasive Surveillence: I use ad blockers but a bunch of people don’t, on principle though it’s really fuckin’ creepy that every click you make on one of these event platforms is tracked. Simply navigating to a sponsor booth counts as a ‘lead’ to the sponsor. Yikes!

• Poor AV Quality: I get that people have to record from their homes but maybe recording someone’s Zoom isn’t the best way to do this? I’m sympathetic, this is legit a hard problem to solve, but many large conferences are still charging an arm and a leg to sponsors (and less for attendees but that’s a different point) so how about you do local recording then edit things later? If you’re going to charge me at all then I expect the production values to at least beat out a random Twitch streamer.

• Poor Viewing Experience: A tiny pop-out 720p video that artifacts when I change the size is… not great. Integrate chat and Q&A better. Do something unique with the format. I sit on enough Zoom calls. Like, why would I pay money to watch videos with a worse player than YouTube? There’s millions of hours of shit out there for free!

• Yet Another Slack: I just don’t want to join more Slack channels where people are randomly @here’ing and I never know if it’s an event organizer with an announcement or some salesperson trying to coax people into their virtual booth.

• Did I Mention Virtual Booths Yet: I have never interacted with anyone in a Virtual Booth and I never will. This appears to be a common sentiment.

Why Do Virtual Events Suck To Sponsor?

Alright, let’s flip the script. I’m wearing my business hat now.

• Bad UX: You think the attendee experience is bad, the admin/sponsor controls and views on these platforms is worse. Arbitrary requirements, poor control over look and feel, nah fam miss me with this.

• Poor Interactivity: You know what’s great about a real booth? People wander by and they get interested. Why do they wander by? Because they’re not at home, they need to kill time, and the snacks are on the trade floor. Maybe they just want a t-shirt or whatever, fine, but we do actually get a lot of really valuable feedback and eyes on the product by doing demos. This is extremely useful, and it simply doesn’t happen at virtual events.

• Attendee Impedence Mismatch: This is more of a theory but I suspect that the attendee mix for virtual events in terms of titles is significantly out-of-balance compared to in-person events. One popular (n = ~1300) virtual event this year had self-reported attendance of only 4% for management roles, but over 40% IC (developer/devops/ops) roles. My hypothesis is that “decision makers” are less likely to attend virtual events because they’re intensely overbooked during the in-person -> distributed team transition period and are oversubscribed on other things, which translates into less useful direct sales conversations, but I could be off-base here. If nothing else, my anecdata from talking about this seems to indicate that attendees just don’t really go to virtual booths.

• Success Looks Different: This is one of those ‘two-way street’ problems, but I don’t think organizers did a great job in general making sponsors successful, and I don’t think sponsors had the muscle to make themselves successful in a lot of ways. Trying to be too different caused a lot of friction, however, and during a time of reinvention this friction reduced experimentation in my opinion.

Why Do Virtual Events Suck To Speak At?

Last part - the speaker experience.

• My Home Is Not Your Home: One of the low key worst things about the pandemic has been the idea of us ‘opening up our homes’ and letting people see how we live. Could we fuckin’ not? Like I don’t believe that I even have to discuss this but we should probably put the Room Rater person on trial for crimes against humanity. I don’t want to have to be super concious about my webcam or audio or whatever, I don’t want to spend hours browsing through Ulta looking for face creams and trying to figure out makeup that doesn’t make it look obvious that I’m wearing makeup and shit like that.

• Performative Everything: This relates to the above point, but when all you have is a video and you want to be engaging, you have to invest in production values to stand out. Gotta learn Premiere and After Effects and Audition and a bunch of other stuff (lol no our employers will not pay for someone to do this, not after they laid off thousands of people earlier this year), gotta come up with new ways to stay interesting, gotta do streams, gotta go viral, gotta keep putting out content. I enjoy this stuff and I still hate it.

• Talking To The Wall: It’s absolutely miserable trying to record a talk and just speaking to the camera. It’s tough to make jokes, it’s tough to get a feel for how the audience is reacting to things. People don’t really react in chat (live or pre-recorded) when talks do happen. Are they even listening? Does anyone even care? I don’t know. I stopped submitting to virtual event CFPs because of this, it’s just not at all fun or effective and I think the audience can tell when I’m not into it.

• What’s The Point, Even?: The devil’s bargain for events over the past, oh, decade or so has been pretty simple. The event promoters bring an audience, you bring the content, and then you use that exposure to get more bookings, etc. etc. Sponsors pay for booths because they have that captive audience. Speakers benefit because their content isn’t public-public: You have to show up to hear it, this means we can give the same talk multiple times (and grow/change that talk to keep it fresh), organizers benefit by gatekeeping the content, etc. etc. While virtual events do withold content from public channels for some period of time (I believe InfoQ and O’Reilly are gating things you do for them for a long period of time to subscribers), I’m not entirely sure they offer a ton of benefits any more. From my perspective, if I simply wanted to deliver talks, why wouldn’t I just put it on YouTube? Why wouldn’t I just stream on Twitch? Advertising is pretty cheap and extremely easy to target – why not create a YT channel and start doing talks/news/whatever and sponsoring links to it? If the only thing it costs you is time – and outside of the strictures of a “conference talk format” I bet I can be more time-efficient – the gatekeeping/screening power of a judged CFP is dramatically reduced. If the event organizers aren’t making their actual product more compelling than some rando on YouTube then I gotta ask what are we even doing here?

How To Make Virtual Events Not Suck

Honestly, as a replacement for real events, you can’t. You can’t just take what worked and slap it online and have it go well or be as fun or useful or valuable or whatever as a real event.

Ok, smartass, what should we do then?

We already have a model for how to create engaging educational programming that people can watch on a screen, it’s called television. If you’re going to run a purely virtual event, start there. I’ll talk about “hybrid” events in the next section, so stay with me for the future - but let’s talk about what I think a good virtual event would look like.

Single Track. SINGLE TRACK!!

Not everyone in your audience is going to be interested in everything, but we should group things together into blocks of programming so that you’re more likely to get a critical mass of people watching things at the same time. The benefit of one-to-many presentation formats is that you can increase that ‘many’ many times over. Again, think TV. As an attendee, it’s a lot better to ask for a single contiguous chunk of time on one or two days (like, a three or four hour block) than it is to ask for 30 minutes at different times over a week. If people can’t attend live, fine, there’s video on demand. Even better, this helps expose your audience to things they maybe wouldn’t have considered or found interesting just from the description, you’re actually doing them a service.

Stop Having Booths

Commercials have been used to great effect over the history of television to sell people on things. Give sponsors space, let them come up with their own cool ideas, have them run those ideas on their own turf - I guarantee you every marketing person in the world would rather have their own Marketo page or whatever to do lead capture than work with importing from yet another CSV with non-normalized data. Give your sponsors the tools and time they need to be successful, but don’t be so afraid to give up control.

If you’re going to pre-record, ACTUALLY PRODUCE THE VIDEOS.

It’s very nice that you’re sending people another ring light and microphone (it is!) but my 0.02 is your money would be better spent on asking people if they wanted those things and if not, get someone to help them produce their videos. Even better if you can work with speakers individually to help them bring their talks to life - motion graphics, better demos, etc. etc. Movie magic, baby! Let’s go! This is a lot more expensive and time-consuming than just drop shipping another Blue Yeti to people, I get that, but I think it’s a lot better for attendees and speakers. Even better if you can book studio time for folks and really get profesh with it.

PS: Have people record slides and camera to separate local files then take those local files and use them to create the final video, don’t use the Zoom cloud recording, it compresses shit. Ideally don’t use Zoom to record at all, use something like VLC? I get that it requires more time and effort but c’mon.

Don’t Reinvent YouTube

This goes back to the single-track thing, but c’mon, Akamai and YouTube and Amazon and so many other people have excellent global-scale video streaming services. You can stream 4K out to YouTube. Just… have a livestream embedded into a schedule page that people can refer to. There’s so many examples of how to do a good livestream out there. Like, there’s an official chess channel on Twitch that gets tens of thousands of concurrent viewers… and it’s chess. We can probably out-produce chess, right?

Figure out why your audience is there, work for them.

The biggest, and final thing I’ve got here, is why are you doing a virtual event? Are you a company hosting a developer/end-user summit or something? Just go copy what GitHub did with Universe 2020 or what Microsoft did with Build this year and call it a day. Or don’t, because y’all are fine and are going to be hosting in-person events once you can. (Also, please read the next section on hybrid events)

Are you not one of those? Then it gets trickier.

If you’re a community event, then it’s tough. I think there’s two models here. The first is this - build a sustaining, and sustainable, community. Stop thinking of your thing as a “once a year” gathering, and figure out how to turn it into a year-round destination. If you’re, like, a GopherCon or something… you have a really cool Discord server now with thousands of people. Why not do streams every month, have people submit videos and talks that you premiere on YouTube, do panels and q&a’s and things like that and build that audience/community up so it’s not just around for a week at a time? I think the other side of this coin is to make your events, well, EVENTS! If you’re doing something weird (like the Animal Crossing thing, natch) then put together a tight six to eight hours of content and let people block our their day for it. Again, it’s easier to ask for a chunk of contiguous time than it is to ask for a lot of little dribs and drabs of time.

The Part Where I Talk About Hybrid Events

Y’all know anything about speedruns? It’s a somewhat niche community of people who play video games really fast. Twice a year there’s a big speedrunner conference called Games Done Quick where they raise money for charity. Anyway, thousands of people show up in-person, millions watch through livestreams over the course of a week.

Sound familiar-ish?

A Hybrid Event Is Two Separate Events And That’s OK

If you’re planning on making a hybrid (in-person + online) event then you need to make two separate events and experiences. Half-assing either isn’t gonna go great and is just gonna disappoint everyone. What does this mean in practice?

• Don’t try to stream every track. First off, you’re gonna have to sell a newborn to pay for that much bandwidth from your venue. Second, you need to provide programming to virtual attendees during breaks and trying to coordinate that across multiple simultaneous tracks and streams seems like it’d be quite the headache. Maybe if you’re big enough you can do this, I dunno.

• Allow for pre-recorded talks as well. One of the upsides to virtual events is that it provides a way for people to submit talks that wouldn’t work in-person (a special shout out to Infrastructure for Entertainment at KubeCon NA 2020 Virtual seriously go watch this one), or from people who for whatever reason can’t or won’t travel to an event due to any number of reasons.

• Provide special programming for your virtual guests (and give your live attendees a way to watch it!), this can be everything from panels and speaker Q&A’s with giveaways, to sponsor booth tours, to wrap-up panels at the end of the day.

• Live streams should be free. What it says on the tin, really. If you’re doing some sort of multi-track thing, there should be a free stream of the keynotes, recorded talks, and special segments that airs each day for some portion of the time at least. AWS kinda does this with re:Invent.

• If you are streaming talks as well, the remote audience needs to have an interaction method with the speaker beyond just Q&A in my opinion. Maybe just have a little ‘like’ button they can hammer on, I dunno. This is probably more useful if you’re doing extremely small in-person segments so the majority of the audience is virtual, I dunno. Would be interesting to test it out!

Hybrid Events Are Maybe The Future

I think on some level the idea of a blended virtual/in-person event will persist going forward, or if nothing else, there’ll be a greater focus on the virtual side of these events. Covid-19 will stop being as much of a problem eventually. People will go back to having in-person events for no other reason than we all want to sing woah-oh oh really loud or participate in group activities. The business value of seeing other people in person is pretty high both from a sales-y and a professional networking-y way.

That said, there’s a huge amount of people who will show up online to participate if we make the room for them. There’s a world of creativity and unique ways to communicate and present information and get concepts across that a person standing on a stage paging through a slide deck doesn’t get across. I think we can figure both of these things out and go forward into the future.

Conclusion

I miss you all. See you in 2021.

Also I think these events did good this year in no particular order: DevOpsDays Chicago, LeadDev Live, DefCon, GopherCon, GitHub Universe, Deserted Island DevOps.