Show notes
Matty and Trevor host a supersized panel about devopsdays Chicago 2020, the first virtual version of the event. The panel: Kevin Reedy, a technical account manager at Kong who ran the AV team, Sasha, a long-time Chicago organizer who pushed for going virtual, Jason Yee, Director of Advocacy at Gremlin, a speaker, Kat Cosgrove, a developer advocate at JFrog who moderated, Laura Santamaria, a developer advocate at LogDNA who gave an Ignite, and Chris Read, an organizer on the virtual team who has been involved since the first devopsdays in Ghent. The cold open is Jason: "With the Yak and with DevOps Deep Thoughts, everything else, it was very much DevOps Days Chicago."
Deciding to Go Virtual
The organizers took three to four weeks to decide, and Matty says the focus was on outcomes and not on platforms, since "that's so very DevOps," being outcome-driven and not implementation-driven. Matty says engineers default to "how would we do that in Slack?" and argues the wrong question about virtual events is how to replicate the hallway track, since that gets you "augmented reality VR expo booth nonsense." The right question is what you get from the hallway track. Sasha pushed for a virtual event so the community would have somewhere to gather, and for it to be free, with talks watchable on YouTube. They looked at many virtual platforms and said no to all of them. Chris says the worry was making sure participants and speakers felt they got value.
The event was split between an AV team in a studio in Chicago, which recorded and streamed, and a virtual team handling participation, so Matty and Sasha, both in the studio, didn't see how the participant side went.
Audio and Video
Kevin says AV at devopsdays Chicago started out terrible and iterated upward year over year, including live captioning, but this year "we pretty much threw that entire thing out the window." Kevin's priority was quality, and Kevin insisted there be no live remote presenters over Zoom, since internet, audio and lighting are hard to control, and the first minutes of many virtual talks are AV problems. Presenters could record in a studio paid for by the event, with guidelines for two cameras, or self-record using a guide. Trevor wrote most of the self-recording guide, drawing on experience recording the podcast. AV Chicago, the local partner, did all the editing for consistency. After each talk, a live Q&A or fireside chat over Zoom, joined early so lighting and audio could be checked, ran on the main YouTube stream.
Kevin says the studio was in a Chicago music venue Kevin loves, and the AV Chicago team was wonderful. Matty adds that the fireside chats were in front of a fake fireplace that Sasha figured out how to turn on, and that speakers could be in the chat during their own talks, which Matty says gave more riffing opportunity than in most virtual events.
Why Discord
Matty says the plan started with Slack, then Matty wished Slack had video channels like Discord's, and realized Discord was the answer. The event was low-risk since it was free, so they could take a gamble. The main concern was abuse, and Discord offered more granular permissions and moderation than other tools. They used bots so people had to accept the code of conduct to get access. Matty recalls Dr. Richard Cook asking what they'd do if everything went wrong on Discord, and the answer was turning it off, plus recruiting volunteer moderators from across the devopsdays community worldwide. Matty also says they recorded how-to videos and over-rotated on onboarding. Matty is writing a blog post with details.
Kat has done roughly 25 to 30 virtual conferences this year and calls this one of the favorites, since Discord allows friendly, genuine communication with attendees and speakers, is easy to moderate, and "if DEF CON can pull it off with tens of thousands of attendees, than anybody should be able to." Kat says moderating was often facilitating, and once a good question started, a room self-managed for 15 or 20 minutes, feeling as close to an in-person conference with real breakout rooms as Kat has had.
Breakouts Behind the Scenes
Matty didn't call them open spaces, but they followed the spirit, with attendee-suggested topics in text or video rooms. Chris says the proposal channel went unnoticed at first, so moderators reseeded topics, people voted with emojis, and video rooms were capped at 25 users, so a moderator had to be in place first. In the first round, people hopped in and out and nobody turned on cameras, and it took five or six minutes to get people talking, but it got easier. Organizers and moderators had separate channels, Jerry acted as ringmaster for the virtual team, and a read-only FAQ was updated live. Chris didn't hear about any problems getting into Discord, joking "We didn't observe it, therefore it did not occur." Chris found the virtual side more draining than an in-person conference, with constant context switching.
The Speaker Side
Laura recorded the Ignite at home, following Trevor's guide, with a bedsheet taped to a coat rack to reflect light, and needed around 15 takes because of cars passing the window and a hand-off of an inflatable microphone. The Ignite speakers passed inflatable mics from one to the next, and Laura dropped the mic onto a pile of blankets that the dogs then lay on. Matty ordered the mics in sets of five with random colors, and had hoped someone would mess up the hand-off. Laura says watching your own talk while chatting is more nerve-wracking than live, but being in the discussion all day meant nobody missed the hallway track.
Jason recorded in a studio near train tracks in a sketchy area, ended up sitting, and was the last talk of the day, followed by a fireside chat with Matty and the DevOps Yak. Jason says the chat let Jason skip watching the video of the talk, and that Matty and Sasha were exhausted, which Jason says shows that virtual events are a lot of work. Sasha says Zoom-style events are more exhausting because you don't get five minutes chatting with a friend and a coffee. Jason says a polished recording helps with future CFPs, and jokes that the bar is now high for organizing.
The Yak, Deep Thoughts and Stickers
Josh Zimmerman traditionally gives a funny Ignite, and with extra stream space Josh recorded a series of DevOps Deep Thoughts that played through the day. Kevin says sponsors got a three-minute pitch, longer than usual, sandwiched between two Deep Thoughts so people would not skip them. The team also filmed the yak costume against a green screen and Trevor turned about 25 minutes of footage into yak bumpers, which Matty says led many viewers to think the yak was live. Sasha says they were a major improvement over running dry content.
Matty had avatar stickers of speakers and organizers made, designed by Kelly Mahoney, in place of the professional headshots of the previous year. Laura says it was the best speaker gift ever, because it was a drawing of Laura. Jason says it worked because it was something nobody thought to buy. Kat, who had never been to devopsdays Chicago, says the small things going wrong, like shuffling moderators and scrambling for topics, made it feel more like a normal conference than platforms that hide every hiccup, and felt "more normal for a day, which is extremely valuable right now."
Matty ends by reading part of an iTunes review from a nurse who finds the podcast gold, and says reviews like that are why the show has kept going for seven years.
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