Very difficult and very interesting: IT-communities on TechTrain

Last year we held the TechTrain IT-festival in St. Petersburg. In addition to reports, sponsorship activities and the like, there was another important component: stands of various IT communities. Typically, these communities organize meetings for a narrower circle of "friends", and here they are confronted with a large and mixed audience, they have looked at others and have shown themselves.



This year we will hold a new TechTrain even larger than last year. And this time we want to collect even more communities. Therefore, if you are involved in any of them, this post is for you: you will understand what participation means for the community and whether it suits you. And if you are not involved, you can better understand what to expect at the festival.



What does community participation in TechTrain look like? There is a stand, and what exactly happens on it depends on the imagination and the efforts of the community itself, a variety of options are possible:

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• Communicating with community leaders
• Round tables
• Games (for example, Code in the Dark blind layout)
• Quizzes
• Reports (directly on the stand or on a special Demo Stage)
• Distribution merchandise

What is the community doing all of this, what experience do they get and how satisfied are they? To answer these questions, we turned to them ourselves: we asked representatives of the three communities that were on the first TechTrain last year.

Dotnetru

JUG.ru Group : First, tell us about the community itself: have you existed for a long time, what exactly are you doing?



Anatoly Kulakov : The community has existed for about four years. At first it was St. Petersburg, and somewhere in a year Moscow appeared, which can be considered the appearance of DotNetRu as such: we call it “the union of all .NET-communities in Russia”.



The goal of DotNetRu is to search for new active cities and leaders, the organization of the .NET community and the popularization of .NET: collecting mitaps, writing articles, picking up news, joint activities, projects, master classes, hackathons - everything that concerns .NET.



JUG.ru Group : Why did you decide to participate in TechTrain, and what were your expectations then?



Yulia Tsisyk : In general, the whole community exists, because all its organizers are not exactly in place - I want some kind of propulsion. And TechTrain was an excellent opportunity, firstly, for all of us to meet in person (we are from different cities), and secondly, to make quite a large-scale activity.



We just really wanted to do it, and then we started to think, why should we need this? After TechTrain we got some exhaust in terms of increasing the community, but far less than from the DotNext conference. When Tolya from DotNext from the stage “Listen, guys, we also have a community,” many more people came to us. But TechTrain allowed us to tell other communities that we can unite at all - as it turned out, this is rare. Except for us, in Russia there are no particularly unified communities, everything is fragmented, even Peter - Moscow.

After TechTrain, we had the first exit reports: the guys from Moscow went to Saratov, and the speaker from Kazan went to Moscow. Due to the fact that we personally met, we all started it.

Anatoly: This event was probably even more useful for us than for others. Although the surrounding were also very pleased.



Nikita Danilov: It seemed to me that all the communities are like this - a lot of people all over Russia, a lot of things. And on TechTrain it turned out that we are some kind of hyperactive. It was interesting for me to see how other communities work. Well, I believe that the popularization of .NET is also important: we are young people in our brains instilled .NET.



JUG.ru Group : What exactly happened on your stand?



Anatoly: We made a practically full-fledged program for both days, with the exception of slots, when our .NET speakers spoke in large halls: we had a lot of activities, starting from round tables and ending with contests and games. We stocked up with a large number of gifts, interesting questions for quizzes, tips for discussions and so on. It seems to me that there was a full-fledged track of a full-fledged conference, I am pretty sure that almost no one else did this.



Nikita : We had two round tables about the effectiveness of the programmer, we tried to think together and discuss how to be more efficient in order to enjoy the code more without spending too much time.



Yulia : We also understood what we could do on the go - it was not scheduled.



Anatoly : We even had a poetry contest.







Julia : Initially, I was against him, I thought it would not go at all: severe programmers would come and say, "What the hell are these poems." But in the end they brought such a number of works - I did not expect it at all. For example:

The programmer has a huge class

Huge cycle in class tom

And the programmer goes the scientist

Everything walks around .NET around.



Going to the right - the bug starts,

Left - “Ficha!” Says,

There are miracles - there the user wanders,

The boss is waiting for release sitting.

And what we are good at: we had very non-standard souvenirs, so they even came to us just for their sake.



JUG.ru Group : And which of these varieties did the audience accept best?



Julia : In my opinion, a very cool topic - round tables. We were a little let down by the stand format: it was hard to hear, we had to shout. But in general, as a move on a stand, this is the very thing, as it gives the opportunity to talk to a large number of people at once. Reports on the stand - it is less convenient, especially long.



Anatoly : In a constant hum, it is difficult to keep the viewer for more than 10 minutes.



Julia : And the screen does not allow making a presentation so that it can be seen by absolutely everyone. This is still not a hall, and there are many difficulties.



I am for souvenirs, because people need something to attract. Those who did not know about .NET would hardly have come to our booth if, for example, we had no balls hanging.



Anatoly : We also specifically invited a very cool photographer, and we got great photos .



From the pictures you can easily determine the scale: there are pictures of our contests and quizzes, where there are so many people that they could not fit them into the frame.



JUG.ru Group : When there are so many different things, what does the life of those who organize all this look like?



Yulia : You are at the booth all day, you hardly have time to listen to the reports. If you really want to go to some one, ask the guys on the stand in advance so that they don’t touch you in this slot, but they can even pull it back. You expect your presence at the conference on the basis of what you will hang out at the stand, and not to listen to the reports. This is not a plus or a minus - it's just such a feature.



Of course, the preparation here is more complicated than the usual mitap, but we are so many and so cool to everyone that it did not seem to me that it was very stressful. Yes, it takes time to prepare, think through the schedule, search for those who will speak, and so on. But without that, we usually live like this.



Anatoly : If you don’t go into details - this is definitely hell, where you ride a bike, it burns, and everything around you burns. But it normal.







As a result, for us it was a separate challenge. We have become accustomed to doing local events, and we understand how this happens, and here is a global event, people from all over Russia need to get together, synchronize, prepare together, find hotels, somehow spend interesting time together, entertain others and themselves - for It was definitely a challenge for us.



Julia : Tolya was more difficult, because he is from St. Petersburg and was the "receiving party." Besides the fact that he organized the work at the stand, he also organized our leisure outside the conference.



Anatoly : There was a lot of interesting things, and this work was a pleasure - this is exactly the case when you try and get a result that is many times greater than your efforts. It was great - and the preparation itself was excellent, and the event was great, and the results were chic.



I was convinced a hundred times in our team: I had never worked with them before, we didn’t pin any important things on each other, and the result impressed me immensely, I didn’t expect it. I think we rallied much stronger than before.



JUG.ru Group : What would you recommend to other communities that reflect on participating in the next TechTrain?



Julia : Exactly participate. If you have doubts, probably there is some kind of moral readiness to participate, otherwise you would not have thought about it from the beginning. If you have never tried to participate in such events, it is worth a try at least once.



As for the movement, I am still at round tables: if they are not on a narrow specialized topic, then everyone can participate, because everyone loves talking about it and arguing. Attract a large number of people.



And we need some kind of chip on the stand, which will highlight it among all the others - maybe even outwardly.

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Dmitry Nazarov nazarov_tech (SPb Reliability Meetup, ex-PiterPy Meetup)

JUG.ru Group : You participated in the previous TechTrain with one community, and in the new you will be with another. For starters, tell me about both.



Dmitry : PiterPy Meetup , what I did with the guys before - St. Petersburg Python mitap and about the world of development around, about everything that may worry and be problematics for the developer or developer of Python. He is very cool, and in many respects it is the flagship mitap in St. Petersburg - in terms of frequency, audience, experiments, level.



And my new mitap is on Site Reliability Engineering : SPb Reliability Meetup . It is for devops, infrastructure engineers. All those who write a lot of code, but not the application code, and infrastructure. People who are responsible for monitoring, clusters, servers, clouds, containers and loads. Usually we do classical meetings with reports, but we try to other formats, for example, we recently made brunch, it went very well:







And soon we will launch a workshop, they always go with people.



JUG.ru Group : What were your impressions of TechTrain?



Dmitry : This is for the PiterPy Meetup, probably, was the first time when we made a stand in a format where you need to stand and do all sorts of activities, give away prizes for more than one day. It was a very cool experience, and I personally realized for myself that the stand was a real serious thing to plan, write the script directly by the hour and by the minute, plan the activity, and look for prizes in advance.



We did not, and it was necessary. Learned experience.



JUG.ru Group : What exactly was on your stand?



Dmitry : We cut in the game, though not ours. His, as usual, did not have time to finish, poor planning. But we found a Python game on the Internet, where you have to go through the dungeon, kill the orcs, and do all this with the help of Python code. It was cool, people were being drawn in.



It looks good, it looked cool on the plasma, and even people who had never programmed in their life wrote a few lines of code. In my opinion, such a pull-out at a completely zero level is cool.



We also traditionally played our videos from our mitaps - with funny subtitles, because YouTube, with automatic text recognition, generates funny texts, where I am not Dmitry Nazarov, but Mickey Nazarov, and stuff like that. Even their own memes on the subject of subtitles under the commercials quickly appeared - also quite a team building for the team of orgov.



As practice shows, all this comes in well and attracts: people see a roller on the plasma, they fit, they start to penetrate. Communicated again, dragged everyone: “Pss, man, do you want a little python?”, Told about the language, evangelized. We even managed to do some good to our friendly communities - Django Girls, PyLadies.



But, in fact, we did little activity then, mostly we went on charisma and communication. But, it seems to me, I don’t need to pull it out a second time, it is necessary to plan.



JUG.ru Group : To the words “being drawn in at zero level”: do we understand correctly that, from your point of view, the festival is fundamentally different from the meeting by the diversity of the audience?



Dmitry : Of course, at such large events more students, more than some random people, and this is good. Because when you cook only in your swamp, you do not drag new ones.



But at PiterPy Meetup, too, many outside people came - business, HR-s, whatever. And it was cool: he has a focus on engaging, and not as it happens, “you don’t write in our language, why did you come to us, go away and in general”. Sometimes this is served as a joke, sometimes more seriously, but this attitude in projects that I do has never been promoted. In the same SPb Reliability, we are generally happy with everything, we are inviting everyone and we plan to do this on TechTrain too.



JUG.ru Group : Were there any tangible results, like new people, in the telegram chat?



Dmitry : Yeah. In my opinion, plus 30 people or even more. The effect was palpable, the influx of newcomers is cool and cool. And the chat itself is livened up, because everyone is discussing this big event, most of the root members of the community go there.



I hope that with SPb Reliability will be the same. This is an event for us directly - we announce on all our platforms when we go to a certain number at a certain event, for example, TechTrain.



JUG.ru Group : How does preparation look from an organizational point of view, what is the volume of work?



Dmitry : If you do well, the amount of work is large. This is the preparation of a large stand for a big event, just like a big conference.



In SPb Reliability Meetup there are four of us now, I plan to grow a team somewhere up to 6-7 people, and we need to gradually improve everyone and so on, so we will scatter this load. Regarding how it looks - we are standard, we conduct it as a project. There is a conditional PM, which (as people with experience of mitaps) sometimes turns out to be me, sometimes Vitaly Levchenko ( antarx ). There is a distribution of tasks, there is a board where everything is divided, there is agile - not with sprints, of course, but agile in the sense that we are trying, looking, trying to play along and do something else further. This is like a project for which, however, money is not paid, but it must be done.



JUG.ru Group : At the event itself, did the booth occupy all the time, or did it succeed, replacing each other, to see something else?



Dmitry : Naturally, we are replacing everyone, because otherwise there is no point in going somewhere and preparing so much so as not to even show off reports, communication and other things. I left the panel discussion to hold, for example. On other people's stands to look and meet.



JUG.ru Group : What would you like to recommend to other communities that can now reflect on participation?



Dmitry : What I said about the stand: it must be directly done, done. And I highly recommend everyone to participate.

As they say, “if you are not involved in politics, politics is involved in you,” and in IT it’s the same: if you aren’t seen at festivals and conferences, if you don’t have any stands or activity, then you won’t get fresh blood, the community will not develop and you will not go far.

Therefore, we must go everywhere and stir up everything!

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Peiterjs

JUG.ru Group : Introductory question: tell us about the community itself.



Mikhail Poluboyarinov : PiterJS has existed since May 2014, we have been organizing monthly meetings. In addition to TechTrain, they participated in other events - IT Global Meetup, HolyJS.



JUG.ru Group : Why did you decide to participate in TechTrain, what were your expectations, and what was the reality compared to your expectations?



Mikhail : I remember, we had a long discussion about whether we would participate, and then thought about the program. In the end, they decided not to make reports, some workshops and the like, but instead to do an entertaining thing. In my opinion, it turned out to be a curious and useful experience.



Andrei Gurylev : Yes, it was fun. I liked that the audience could finally see not only HR stands. Our goal is completely different, and people come to us as if they were at a fair, they are having fun here and that’s all. No one owes nothing to nobody. I really liked this format.



JUG.ru Group : Tell me more about the "entertainment thing."



Mikhail : We did the contest “Code in the Dark”, where two people sit down, they have layouts, there is a console, where they type in HTML with CSS, and they need to impose this layout as closely as possible, without seeing the result. This is all sent to the server, and the server pixel-pixel checks everything and determines who has more coincidence. There were prizes: we played out two tickets to the conference for the first and second place, plus consolation prizes in the form of merchandise.



When the event itself took place, we turned on the music, a large crowd gathered around us, and everyone watched it. It was fun. True, others complained that we were too noisy. The next time it is worth a noisy stand like us to try to put so that they do not interfere with the rest.



It's funny that Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine agreed to participate in Code in the Dark, who was present at the conference as a speaker. Vitali is like that - he is behind any movement. I come to our booth, I say: here, at such a time there will be a demonstration performance, Vitaly Friedman will take part. Everyone was delighted. Accordingly, we need rivals.



Andrei : Everyone was afraid to compete with him, because he is a star, but in the end a “humanization of the star” happened: it became clear that he was also a man.



JUG.ru Group : Did he eventually win or lose?



Mikhail : Unfortunately, he made one typo in the code and lost. Well, it happens to everyone. If it were not for this print, most likely, would have won. We specifically for this competition have chosen a particularly complex layout with a lot of elements (even the time for it was given more than the standard 15 minutes), it was no wonder there was a mistake.







JUG.ru Group : What did your activity look like before the event and during?



Mikhail : Since this was a new experience for us, we first looked for an idea. When we decided what we were going to do, “Code in the Dark”, the preparation began, we got the code base, and it turned out that on the day of the conference the last commits were still being used to finish fixing some things.



We understood beforehand what equipment we needed for the stand, contacted the organizers, and provided it to us. We came to the event earlier to connect everything. Six people could have passed from the community; as a result, there were five of us most of the time.



Most of the time we could move away from the stand (it was important that at least someone stayed there and could communicate). But it was specifically at the time of the events that all our guys gathered there, they helped and suggested something. People gathered around, they asked what it was, how to participate and the like, we answered them.



Andrei : We all answered, relatively speaking, “according to a pattern,” and for us it was at first very strange. “Well, I already explained why I should explain it 50 more times.” But after the 51st time, it was even fun.



JUG.ru Group : Did you somehow count the results of participation - for example, how many people did this lead to the community?



Mikhail : Indeed, there were people who immediately joined the community (I will not name a specific number). But more importantly, there were people who didn’t know anything about us, but now they found out, and they don’t join right away, but they can later. I think the increase after such an event is extremely difficult to calculate, because it works mostly in the future. In general, I think that it was useful, we declared ourselves, there were quite a lot of students.



Andrei : For me, this was useful primarily because we told the world that we are not only a community with mitaps, but we can also go somewhere with a stand. We said this to companies that could invite us (be it conferences or something else), and other communities that never stood with stands, and when they saw us, they understood "why not?"



JUG.ru Group : Now, based on your experience, can you tell other communities about participating in TechTrain 2019 or another similar event?



Michael : I can say only from myself. First, to participate in such an event, you need to understand whether you need it and why. Such an event may be useful to attract new blood. At the event with thousands of people, there is certainly an audience that you have not yet reached.



Secondly, it is necessary to think through the program for this event. Definitely need to cook something, and not just come with a stand, sit down and sit, spinning some videos. If you want to be interesting, if you want to attract attention to yourself, you need to start planning the program.



Andrei : First of all, participation with a booth is free conference tickets for stand assistants! Well, in fact, TechTrain is a low-cost event, developers do not get so little to deny themselves such pleasures.



But it is also a cool motion. And if you, as a community, are engaged in something exclusively from pragmatic interests, then you need to think very hard and estimate an approximate possible exhaust, which is very difficult to assess. And if you joke in the movement, then there are a lot of people, there is someone to talk to.



This is like a regular conference, where we come not only to listen to the reports, but also to communicate with colleagues. But here you will have a “special status”. When you communicate with people from the stand, they look at you differently, they communicate with you differently, for them you are not “this particular developer from this company”, but a representative of the community, and this changes you in the eyes of people. This is also cool.

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Total

What conclusions suggest themselves, if we compare the responses of different communities?



On the one hand, to participate in such a way as to get the most from the event is difficult. It takes a lot of effort, and the community should be ready for active teamwork. So the decision on participation must be made consciously, understanding what you are going for.



On the other hand, the people who invested these efforts do not regret the time spent and believe that the matter was clearly worth it. They got a bright story, remembered by him, and TechTrain participants. For them, this was an opportunity to see colleagues in the community, and their main audience, and “outsiders” who may also be interested and drawn. There are advantages to the process as well (the two days themselves were intense and interesting), and the result (the community became more widely known). In general, to participate with maximum efficiency is "very difficult and very interesting." As a result, all respondents want to participate in TechTrain 2019.



If you also think about participating (or you know those who should think), there is a special page for communities on TechTrain where you can apply for participation.