JUG.ru Group's internal kitchen: how is the conference for 1000 programmers done
It may seem that everything is clear about the conference from the side: they are made just so that people come and watch. But what is visible to the audience is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a lot of unobvious moments. What is behind the organization of a large 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 yet completed):
')
It would seem, what to do in a whole year? Especially considering that the JUG.ru Group has already been doing more than 10 conferences every year - that is, when they begin to engage in one, many deadlines are much closer. But there are important reasons to start everything so in advance.
Alexey 23derevo Fedorov , director of the JUG.ru Group: “If you want to make an event for 500+ people with several halls, then in St. Petersburg and Moscow you are immediately limited to the framework of several sites. If from 1,000 people, then only Crocus and the World Trade Center remain in Moscow, and ExpoForum and Lenexpo in St. Petersburg.
As we grow, there are less and less suitable sites, and it is becoming more and more difficult to adapt to their available dates. But it 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. For foreign stars, playing with keyouts all over the world, the schedule is planned for a long time ahead. As a result, it came to a situation when in the winter they agreed with the speaker in 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 may be much less obvious: why is it SO MUCH?
Andrei real_ales Dmitriev , program director of Joker 2016, 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 him with comments. On the review there is a speaker himself and from one to five reviewers. If we assume that on average four people are present, then this is already 6 man hours for one review. And in total in the Joker program we have 52 reports. And some of them pass reviews repeatedly.
In addition, we have training for speakers for 16 hours, where there are 10 people. And short online training. In general, 600 people are a rough average for everything. ”
Compared to Joker 2015, which took place at the Park Inn Pulkovskaya hotel, the new, at ExpoForum, is almost three times larger. 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 , executive director of the JUG.ru Group, broke out about them in a monologue almost in the same breath: “There is a whole stream of approvals:“ how big is your stand, let's stand here, no, better there, and which wires will be used, and what electricity, to whom there are so many sockets, and we have a fire exit here, and here there is a fire entrance, but don’t put here, oh my God, and from which stands, of what material ”, you need to send fire safety certificates for each item not lower level KM3, draw a wiring diagram the flow of people’s flow, the interactive arrangement, the guard station scheme, the scheme adapted for the participants with indication of toilets for the disabled, help points, feeding places and other things, the scheme of schemes for all schemes, and the engineering plan in Avtokad on top, send minute-by-minute timing, reconcile everything between the site, several contractors and two dozens of sponsors, and they still have their own car with a trailer, which no one will allow so easily too ... Ass is there, in short! ”
An ordinary viewer may have the question “why bring equipment at all”: do the venues have no own? Even at ExpoForum? If something concrete is missing there, why not just bring this, and not complicate your life by installing several tons? And what is all that weighs so much?
Ivan Jetliner Dolgov , Technical Director: “At sites, especially hotels, their own equipment is often out of date by ten years. And with ExpoForum it is a little different: it was built recently, but we have a large-scale conference for six rooms plus a party, we cannot restrict ourselves to the existing ones. And in order not to take one from one, another 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 lot of equipment; we wrote about it recently. I would like to separately mention 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. By itself, a projector for a large hall weighs 50 kilograms, and it is framed with iron pipes, which adds just as many, all together are usually dragged along. The projector is placed on the construction of more than two meters high, and so that all this does not turn on the audience, it must be strong and massive. In each room at least the projector, plus a spare.
About 40 people participated in the building earlier, and there will probably be 50 at Joker 2016: those guys who brought the equipment and will put it. This is a bunch of handmade, all on the bolts, rivets. 50 people, 6 tons of equipment and up to 10 hours of construction - and this is only preliminary work, without the fact that during the conference itself ”.
It may seem that the work of the speakers and work with the speakers is limited to the preparation of reports. But at Joker 2016, out of 40 speakers, only 13 will be St. Petersburg - that is, with all the others, the question arises of moving them. 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 it is in place.
And when everyone lands, Tatiana Mamedova has to coordinate so many actions that she remembers her maiden name Captain: “Previously, difficult situations arose: the speaker had disappeared, the hotel was bogged down with a room, there were delays on the excursion. Therefore, we understand from experience that we need complete control. The speaker is 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: whether everyone flew in, if the luggage was lost, as well-being.
A day before the conference, the equipment is being tested, speakers with laptops should be delivered to the site. And also an excursion, in front of everyone to call everyone with the question “did they change their mind about going on a tour”. And also speaker dinner, before him also clarify. In general, you feel like a nurse! "
As you know, marketers hate everything, and programmers especially. How in this situation to approach the marketing of an IT conference?
Marketer Ruslan ARG89 Akhmetzyanov : “Nobody loves when he gets a hat.” 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 and of themselves, apart from the conference. And in the end, we simply inform you: since it’s so interesting to you that you’ve read this far, you might also be interested in an event where there will be a lot of useful content at once.
In addition to Habr, we use more traditional advertising (for example, targeted in social networks), but we also try to make it interesting. The recent banner with Shipilev “optimize, I suppose” everyone liked so much that when people saw him, they themselves posted it on Twitter.
The problem of my work: it is difficult to track which of my actions led to attending the conference. If other marketers can understand by cookies that a person bought something after reading their text, then we have 70% of corporate ticket sales, and it turns out this way: first, a person reads something and clicks, 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 do not understand that it is necessary to speak the same language with the audience. A typical mistake of a marketer (I recently happened to me): “Java-code is needed for advertising, but I don’t remember exactly how it is made, well, I’ll write something there, anyway, no one will notice the difference”. Noticed! ”
Although the conference lasts two days, the volunteers participating in it need to devote as many as five to them: they undergo special training, participate in the day of construction and continue to work after the official closure. What makes people give so much time and effort not for money?
Ekaterina Kurilova : “Motivation is different for different volunteers. Some of them are programming, so they like to join the party of experienced developers, and access to conference videos is important. Who is clever, he can even find a job on the sidelines. And there are not IT, they are important certificates of volunteering (they are useful for universities), teamwork experience, training and the general feeling of moving. Now for Joker 2016, I came up with a new promotion in the form of special T-shirts, which no one else will have - Limited Edition, as they say.
We have already developed relationships with volunteers: we do not just throw them a call before the event and forget about them after it, but invest in them. As a result, we have initiative people who not only participate on the site, but even help to search for new speakers and write texts, their activities have seriously expanded. They invest a lot, we are very grateful to them for that.
Well, on Joker 2016, volunteers fly to St. Petersburg even from Moscow, Novosibirsk and Sochi! ”
A person who comes to the conference to hear about the intricacies of the JVM, may at last think about design: yes, the conference has a logo, but what did the designer have to work on there?
Designer Anton Filev knows what he has, what: “With Joker 2016 alone, one has to tinker, because he has as many as 6 rooms, not counting expert zones. How to make a paper program out of it so that it is not a huge poster? And besides the program, for each conference the designer is required to work on something else:
In general, there is no need to be bored: the work continues even when the event itself has already ended. ”
Joker has all the necessary background information - for example, a description of each report. But there may be a feeling that there is no need to work with the text in the JUG.ru Group: the report description is short, and the speaker sends it - just take it and put it on the site, what is the work?
Yana Yegelletezeta Pilyugina explains what: “Before getting to the site, each description was edited: I corrected the spelling, grammatical, punctuation and other shortcomings, in some cases I rewrote a little. I brought everything to the same style: from replacing the first person with a third (we never write “I” in the descriptions) to the same long dash instead of hyphens and the like.
And besides, she 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, there are biographies of speakers on the site. And 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 is 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 there are a lot of them. ”
When you constantly deal with developers, you adopt their habits. Therefore, work tasks become tickets in JIRA. It turned out that this tool, originally created as a bugtracker and often used to manage IT projects, is also excellent for organizing conferences.
However, in our team there is also a developer - Maxim Zverev . He clarified the details of how everything works: “Thanks to a small, self-written pribluda, 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: that as soon as the ticket passes a certain stage, meaning “the report accepted in the program received a description”, this description is automatically added to the site.
Now we create websites using Metalsmith , and Contentful is used for the backend . In addition to JIRA, we use other tools from Atlassian: Confluence, HipChat. The rest is standard: google mail, Adobe package with Anton and so on.
We work all for Mac, but one person in the team installed Windows Macbook itself, claiming that it’s more convenient for him. Who could it be ? ”
More recently, the ranks of the JUG.ru Group have been replenished with new employees, but before that the entire staff consisted of the people listed in this text. And so that a small number of people manage 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.
While I have not yet fully reached this direction, because once upon a time, when three guys-programmers gathered and I, besides the strategic tasks, had a lot of vital issues. It was necessary to simply do the conference, but no one except the four of us was there. Then everything that was not related to marketing, in which Aleksey was involved, the program committee, in which Andrey was engaged, and Vanya’s work with the equipment fell on me.
Gradually, we started to recruit a team, and I began to delegate tasks to new colleagues, teaching them: first, I myself carried out the work, then I built the algorithm that was sewn up in the business process, and this business process was transferred to another person. I exhaled and took up the next direction, but remaining a curator of the surrendered. 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 for you that you have read this far, then Joker himself may be interested in you.
But this is only one of our conferences: in December Moscow DotNext , Heisenbag and HolyJS will follow .
PS from 23derevo : habr, and recommend us a good targetologist? And then targeting and remarketing is our headache. If you know the good - write to me in PM. We will not be 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 yet completed):
- The term for which the preparation began
- The number of man-hours spent on the program
- Total conference area
- The total time of air travel speakers
- Weight of equipment brought to the site
- Volunteer opening hours at the conference
- The file size of the layout of one of the sponsor stands
- The total number of views related to the conference
- The amount of text on the conference site
- Number of tickets in JIRA
- Number of team members JUG.ru Group
')
1 year: the period for which the preparation begins
It would seem, what to do in a whole year? Especially considering that the JUG.ru Group has already been doing more than 10 conferences every year - that is, when they begin to engage in one, many deadlines are much closer. But there are important reasons to start everything so in advance.
Alexey 23derevo Fedorov , director of the JUG.ru Group: “If you want to make an event for 500+ people with several halls, then in St. Petersburg and Moscow you are immediately limited to the framework of several sites. If from 1,000 people, then only Crocus and the World Trade Center remain in Moscow, and ExpoForum and Lenexpo in St. Petersburg.As we grow, there are less and less suitable sites, and it is becoming more and more difficult to adapt to their available dates. But it 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. For foreign stars, playing with keyouts all over the world, the schedule is planned for a long time ahead. As a result, it came to a situation when in the winter they agreed with the speaker in the spring of next year . ”
About 600 man 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 may be much less obvious: why is it SO MUCH?
Andrei real_ales Dmitriev , program director of Joker 2016, 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 him with comments. On the review there is a speaker himself and from one to five reviewers. If we assume that on average four people are present, then this is already 6 man hours for one review. And in total in the Joker program we have 52 reports. And some of them pass reviews repeatedly.In addition, we have training for speakers for 16 hours, where there are 10 people. And short online training. In general, 600 people are a rough average for everything. ”
About 4,000 square meters: Joker Square 2016
Compared to Joker 2015, which took place at the Park Inn Pulkovskaya hotel, the new, at ExpoForum, is almost three times larger. 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 , executive director of the JUG.ru Group, broke out about them in a monologue almost in the same breath: “There is a whole stream of approvals:“ how big is your stand, let's stand here, no, better there, and which wires will be used, and what electricity, to whom there are so many sockets, and we have a fire exit here, and here there is a fire entrance, but don’t put here, oh my God, and from which stands, of what material ”, you need to send fire safety certificates for each item not lower level KM3, draw a wiring diagram the flow of people’s flow, the interactive arrangement, the guard station scheme, the scheme adapted for the participants with indication of toilets for the disabled, help points, feeding places and other things, the scheme of schemes for all schemes, and the engineering plan in Avtokad on top, send minute-by-minute timing, reconcile everything between the site, several contractors and two dozens of sponsors, and they still have their own car with a trailer, which no one will allow so easily too ... Ass is there, in short! ”More than 6 tons: the total weight of the equipment that will be brought to Joker 2016
An ordinary viewer may have the question “why bring equipment at all”: do the venues have no own? Even at ExpoForum? If something concrete is missing there, why not just bring this, and not complicate your life by installing several tons? And what is all that weighs so much?
Ivan Jetliner Dolgov , Technical Director: “At sites, especially hotels, their own equipment is often out of date by ten years. And with ExpoForum it is a little different: it was built recently, but we have a large-scale conference for six rooms plus a party, we cannot restrict ourselves to the existing ones. And in order not to take one from one, another 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 lot of equipment; we wrote about it recently. I would like to separately mention 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. By itself, a projector for a large hall weighs 50 kilograms, and it is framed with iron pipes, which adds just as many, all together are usually dragged along. The projector is placed on the construction of more than two meters high, and so that all this does not turn on the audience, it must be strong and massive. In each room at least the projector, plus a spare.
About 40 people participated in the building earlier, and there will probably be 50 at Joker 2016: those guys who brought the equipment and will put it. This is a bunch of handmade, all on the bolts, rivets. 50 people, 6 tons of equipment and up to 10 hours of construction - and this is only preliminary work, without the fact that during the conference itself ”.
350 hours: the total time of the flights of speakers Joker 2016 (there and back)
It may seem that the work of the speakers and work with the speakers is limited to the preparation of reports. But at Joker 2016, out of 40 speakers, only 13 will be St. Petersburg - that is, with all the others, the question arises of moving them. 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 it is in place.
And when everyone lands, Tatiana Mamedova has to coordinate so many actions that she remembers her maiden name Captain: “Previously, difficult situations arose: the speaker had disappeared, the hotel was bogged down with a room, there were delays on the excursion. Therefore, we understand from experience that we need complete control. The speaker is 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: whether everyone flew in, if the luggage was lost, as well-being.A day before the conference, the equipment is being tested, speakers with laptops should be delivered to the site. And also an excursion, in front of everyone to call everyone with the question “did they change their mind about going on a tour”. And also speaker dinner, before him also clarify. In general, you feel like a nurse! "
235,000: the total number of views associated with Joker 2016
As you know, marketers hate everything, and programmers especially. How in this situation to approach the marketing of an IT conference?
Marketer Ruslan ARG89 Akhmetzyanov : “Nobody loves when he gets a hat.” 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 and of themselves, apart from the conference. And in the end, we simply inform you: since it’s so interesting to you that you’ve read this far, you might also be interested in an event where there will be a lot of useful content at once.In addition to Habr, we use more traditional advertising (for example, targeted in social networks), but we also try to make it interesting. The recent banner with Shipilev “optimize, I suppose” everyone liked so much that when people saw him, they themselves posted it on Twitter.
The problem of my work: it is difficult to track which of my actions led to attending the conference. If other marketers can understand by cookies that a person bought something after reading their text, then we have 70% of corporate ticket sales, and it turns out this way: first, a person reads something and clicks, 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 do not understand that it is necessary to speak the same language with the audience. A typical mistake of a marketer (I recently happened to me): “Java-code is needed for advertising, but I don’t remember exactly how it is made, well, I’ll write something there, anyway, no one will notice the difference”. Noticed! ”
5 working days: volunteer time at Joker 2016
Although the conference lasts two days, the volunteers participating in it need to devote as many as five to them: they undergo special training, participate in the day of construction and continue to work after the official closure. What makes people give so much time and effort not for money?
Ekaterina Kurilova : “Motivation is different for different volunteers. Some of them are programming, so they like to join the party of experienced developers, and access to conference videos is important. Who is clever, he can even find a job on the sidelines. And there are not IT, they are important certificates of volunteering (they are useful for universities), teamwork experience, training and the general feeling of moving. Now for Joker 2016, I came up with a new promotion in the form of special T-shirts, which no one else will have - Limited Edition, as they say.We have already developed relationships with volunteers: we do not just throw them a call before the event and forget about them after it, but invest in them. As a result, we have initiative people who not only participate on the site, but even help to search for new speakers and write texts, their activities have seriously expanded. They invest a lot, we are very grateful to them for that.
Well, on Joker 2016, volunteers fly to St. Petersburg even from Moscow, Novosibirsk and Sochi! ”
3.1 GB: the size of one of the sponsorship booths for Joker 2016
A person who comes to the conference to hear about the intricacies of the JVM, may at last think about design: yes, the conference has a logo, but what did the designer have to work on there?
Designer Anton Filev knows what he has, what: “With Joker 2016 alone, one has to tinker, because he has as many as 6 rooms, not counting expert zones. How to make a paper program out of it so that it is not a huge poster? And besides the program, for each conference the designer is required to work on something else:- "Stubs" for each report
- Site layout
- Pointers on the site
- Press walls
- Brand wall
- Lunch Bracelets
- Sticker
- Souvenir
- Sponsorship booths
- Print banners
- Internet banners
- Images on the site
- Workbook on the basis of the conference
In general, there is no need to be bored: the work continues even when the event itself has already ended. ”
Over 100,000 characters: Joker text volume
Joker has all the necessary background information - for example, a description of each report. But there may be a feeling that there is no need to work with the text in the JUG.ru Group: the report description is short, and the speaker sends it - just take it and put it on the site, what is the work?
Yana Yegelletezeta Pilyugina explains what: “Before getting to the site, each description was edited: I corrected the spelling, grammatical, punctuation and other shortcomings, in some cases I rewrote a little. I brought everything to the same style: from replacing the first person with a third (we never write “I” in the descriptions) to the same long dash instead of hyphens and the like.And besides, she 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, there are biographies of speakers on the site. And 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 is 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 there are a lot of them. ”
694: number of tickets in JIRA by Joker 2016
When you constantly deal with developers, you adopt their habits. Therefore, work tasks become tickets in JIRA. It turned out that this tool, originally created as a bugtracker and often used to manage IT projects, is also excellent for organizing conferences.
However, in our team there is also a developer - Maxim Zverev . He clarified the details of how everything works: “Thanks to a small, self-written pribluda, 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: that as soon as the ticket passes a certain stage, meaning “the report accepted in the program received a description”, this description is automatically added to the site.Now we create websites using Metalsmith , and Contentful is used for the backend . In addition to JIRA, we use other tools from Atlassian: Confluence, HipChat. The rest is standard: google mail, Adobe package with Anton and so on.
We work all for Mac, but one person in the team installed Windows Macbook itself, claiming that it’s more convenient for him. Who could it be ? ”
9 people: the number of team members until recently
More recently, the ranks of the JUG.ru Group have been replenished with new employees, but before that the entire staff consisted of the people listed in this text. And so that a small number of people manage 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.While I have not yet fully reached this direction, because once upon a time, when three guys-programmers gathered and I, besides the strategic tasks, had a lot of vital issues. It was necessary to simply do the conference, but no one except the four of us was there. Then everything that was not related to marketing, in which Aleksey was involved, the program committee, in which Andrey was engaged, and Vanya’s work with the equipment fell on me.
Gradually, we started to recruit a team, and I began to delegate tasks to new colleagues, teaching them: first, I myself carried out the work, then I built the algorithm that was sewn up in the business process, and this business process was transferred to another person. I exhaled and took up the next direction, but remaining a curator of the surrendered. 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 for you that you have read this far, then Joker himself may be interested in you.
But this is only one of our conferences: in December Moscow DotNext , Heisenbag and HolyJS will follow .
PS from 23derevo : habr, and recommend us a good targetologist? And then targeting and remarketing is our headache. If you know the good - write to me in PM. We will not be in debt.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/311792/
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