Dylan Schiemann (Run a Conference in 2 months) & Vicky Lee (Event Diversity)

This month we are delighted to bring you 2 event gurus of the industry to share their expertise and ideas with the Dublin #eventprofs community!

Join Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen to hear how he and his team organised and delivered a successful tech conference, TSConf in just 2 months from concept to delivery.
This will be followed by Vicky Lee, Technical Event Curator and producer of the popular Coding Grace community on driving diversity in events.

The meetup will be held at Dogpatch Lab's fantastic co-working space (huge thank you to Jenny and Liz at Dogpatch for sponsoring the venue). There will be some drinks and nibbles provided (sponsored by voxgig) at the meetup with the option of going along to a local pub for more drinks and networking afterwards.

Please register as soon as possible to avoid disappointment as numbers are limited.

Agenda:

• 6:00 pm Doors open and networking
• 6:25pm Introductions
• 6:30pm Vicky Lee - Diversity, an important ingredient for your events
• 7:10pm Drinks, nibbles and networking
• 7:30pm Dylan Schiemann - Breaking all the rules and not losing your shirt
• 8:10pm Wrap up & move to a local bar for more drinks and networking

TALKS:

Vicky Lee - Diversity, an important ingredient for your events.

We have heard a lot about diversity, and as an organiser, why is this important for your events? What does this mean for your community? I will be talking about my experiences through the years having being part of and involved in the tech community, and how I realised diversity is important when organising events no matter how big or small.

About Vicky-Twomey-Lee:
Vicky Twomey-Lee is a coder, mentor and event organiser who can be found advocating diversity in tech. Vicky also curates the content for and organises numerous conferences and meetups.
https://twitter.com/whykay

Dylan Schiemann - Breaking all the rules and not losing your shirt

There are a number of written and unwritten rules of running conferences such as:

• You need to start planning a conference at least 6 months in advance
• Sponsors need booth space and attendee email addresses to justify their sponsorship
• A few vendor pitches or speeches are ok
• More concurrent tracks will get more people to your event
• The bigger the event the better and more profitable it is
• Open bar tabs are a bad idea
• The quality of conference food doesn't matter
• Hotels and event sites are the best options for events
• You need someone local on the ground to coordinate an event

SitePen CEO is involved with two tech conferences, HalfStack in London and TSConf in Seattle, both of which violate the rules above and yet were very successful.

This talk will look at this year's TSConf as a case study, namely:

• Why we decided to do it with just 2 months notice and planning
• How we planned it and set our goals
• What support we needed/received
• What tools we used
• How we secured sponsorship
• How we preserved an authentic experience for attendees while giving sponsors value
• Lessons learned and what we would do differently next time

About Dylan:
As CEO of SitePen and co-founder of Dojo, Dylan Schiemann is an established presence in the JavaScript and open source communities. Under his direction, SitePen has become the definitive source for enterprise organizations that are focused on creating well-tested, highly performant and sustainable web applications. Dylan’s current initiatives include guiding development on Intern, TypeScript and Dojo 2. Dylan was the co-founder of the Dojo Foundation prior to its merger with the jQuery Foundation to form the JS Foundation. Dylan also helps organise the HalfStack meetup and conference. When not actively engaged in bettering SitePen and demanding better developer tools, Dylan enjoys traveling and sharing his experience at conferences around the world. https://twitter.com/dylans