I wanna build something awesome where:
- Speakers submit session abstracts publicly online
- Vendors can be speakers, too (anybody can submit a talk on anything – your own open source project, paid project, Microsoft can apply, hardware vendors, etc)
- Readers can leave comments on the abstracts to help the author clarify and improve them
- Everybody votes for the abstracts they’d like to see most
- Once a month, voting closes, and the top X speakers/abstracts for next month are picked (maybe 5, maybe 10, let’s play this by ear)
- Sessions are held online in an easy-to-watch platform, on a predictable day/time (like the first Tuesday of every month, or something like that)
- Recordings are posted on YouTube, plus distributed in downloadable podcast form (audio-only, and video)
- Speakers can build up an online presence with great SEO so their work isn’t lost (and replace content they’re no longer proud of over time)
- Speakers can’t present in back-to-back events (to encourage variety)
- Over time, we organize content so that readers can navigate through a learning path with seniority levels
Everything gets done transparently in public: the abstracts, the presenters, the comments, the voting, and the conference itself.
And I bet I can do this whole thing for free, without charging attendees or speakers. Although I’m not betting too much – I’m a huge believer in the Lean Methodology, which means you risk as little as possible when you’re building something up from scratch.
One other tweak: I’ll be the live co-host.
I know first-hand that when you’re presenting online, it’s terrifying. You worry that nobody understands what you’re talking about, or that you’re going too fast, or that you’re unable to handle questions.
For these webcasts, I’ll be right there alongside the presenter, also broadcasting my video, live. I’ll watch the audience Q&A and pose the questions to them verbally. I’ll ask my own questions. If something goes wrong in the demo, I’ll be there to talk to the audience while the presenter works on it. (Trust me, I’m very unflappable – it takes a lot to flap me.)
And if the presenter’s whole session and demos just flat out bomb outright, we’ll throw away the slides and just have a fun, casual interview. This is a community, and we’re here to support each other.
So that’s the pitch I’ve been giving myself for months, but whenever I’m starting something, I try to think about why it won’t work – and why it will.
Why it won’t work
“There’s already a bunch of free platforms.” YouTube, Khan Academy, and just plain old blogs mean that anybody can publish free training. This is different because it’s got a mix of competition and crowd curation.
“PASS and its 24HoP and Virtual Chapters could do this.” In theory, yes, but in practice, no, because the online platform PASS chose (DotNetNuke) has served the community horribly for years. PASS has doubled down on this brittle platform, and it keeps getting worse. Try to find a video archive of past PASS sessions online. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Hell, even just talk to any PASS blog reader about the illegible font size and color on the PASS blogs – we’ve been complaining about that for years, and that’s not even fixable. Don’t even get me started on accessing our community via mobile devices.
“People with big audiences will always win the votes.” It’s possible that a few of us with popular blogs could submit abstracts every month, and end up winning the voting every time. I have more faith in the audience than that, though. Besides, if there’s enough demand, there’s no reason we couldn’t just expand it to monthly, or lengthen the conference to more hours, or more simultaneous tracks.
“Open doesn’t work for conferences.” I know from talking to conference organizers that they want to curate a start-to-finish experience, a balanced mix of material that can appeal to a wide variety of attendees. They want a mix of level 100 to level 400, a mix of engine to BI to development, and they want a balance of new and experienced presenters. I agree that that’s a good idea, but I think that’s a long term goal for the event recordings to serve, not a short term goal for each individual event to serve. The recordings, pieced together over the span of years, will form a basis of instructional videos.
“Not enough people will submit to speak.” Everything starts small, and maybe only half a dozen of us will submit the first time. I’m fine with that. We’ll grow it over time.
“Build it, and they won’t come.” Yes, they will. We get hundreds of registrations for our Office Hours Q&A webcast every week, and that’s even down from its peak when we used to do topical webcasts. I know that if we promote it to our email list, and if there’s topics, folks will show up – especially if they have a voice in picking the topics.
“Speakers will get heartbroken due to bad feedback.” That’s definitely possible – just as it is with regular conferences. However, I think this faster feedback cycle – and public discussions with their potential attendees – will help them improve their abstracts more quickly than just the regular “sorry your abstract didn’t cut it” feedback from regular conferences. Plus, attendees will get more vested in helping speakers build a great abstract – and furthermore, a great session.
Why it will work
The SQL Server speaker community is incredible. I know so many speakers who desperately want to give more of their own time, help teach other people. They want help building a great abstract and getting their material out to the world to help as many people as possible.j
The SQL Server reader community is incredible. It utterly blows my mind that the company email list has over 85,000 people, and just keeps growing. You people love learning about data, and you’re willing to put in your own time to volunteer to help speakers up their game.
The global SQL Server community is online. They can’t get to in-person meetings at their local user group or regional SQLSaturday often enough, or there isn’t a meeting near them. (I know, because I get emails from people all over the world.) We can bring the training to them.
How it will work
I’m putting the GroupBy conference site together as we speak, and I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you’d like to help, tell me where I’ve messed up in this post. Tell me what I could do better about the product, where it’s going to go wrong, or what I should have added.
46 Comments. Leave new
While I don’t see anything wrong with your proposal, I would like to offer my help in any way you can fit me in. I’m not quite ready to be a speaker, but maybe down the road a little bit. I have enjoyed your content, both the personal and the sql related, online for years now. I’m looking forward to this platform. The only thing that everyone is talking about this week, with SQLPASS going on now, that this lacks is the after hours networking… Is there a way to add any of that into this?
WSalzman – yeah, the after hours stuff is actually done before. As folks review, rate, and comment on the abstracts, helping the speaker build and refine their content, we’re going to be building a community of people who are passionate about that specific topic.
Right now, with in-person SQL Server community events, there’s not really a way to comment on the event ahead of time, talk about abstracts, meet other people who are interested in that same abstract, and talk to the speaker. This is a way to work around that.
That’s where I thought you were going with that, but thought I’d mention it.
Great Idea. I’m in.
“Everything gets done transparently in public” The horror ! The horror !
Happy to help out – I’m building a lot of similar infrastructure for SatRdays and doing it open source so can put together variants.
Staff – you were part of the inspiration! I love what you’re doing with SatRdays, and I think the cross-pollination is a no-brainer!
Cool 🙂 if you don’t get in touch before I’ll chat to you at MVP Summit?
Staff – nah, I won’t be there this year, but I’ll catch up with ya online.
Looking forward to see how this will turn out. If I can help in any way just ask.
Martin – sure, will be posting more about it as we go forward. Thanks!
Count me in. Either as a presenter or a provocateur!
Rudy – thanks, sir!
I think this is a really exciting idea, will be interesting to see how it grows
Just wondering if there is scope/demand to run the conference at different times to better suit a global audience? Maybe 1 month in a quarter is run at a time that suits Asia or Europe (similar to what you have done recently with your online training courses)?
This might also make it easier for presenters from other parts of the world to get involved, as well as enabling us to take part in the live Q&A (YouTube videos are great, and will make a really useful online reference post-conference, but are basically passive)
Anyway, appreciate that would take a big time commitment from you as guest host, and there may not be audience demand to support it, so probably not something you’d want to do in the initial Lean pilot phase, but perhaps something to consider for the future
Good luck; with your drive and the community’s support, this idea should fly
Ross – thanks, yeah, I can see doing this in other time zones later as it grows, and as more international folks submit.
I’m in.
Adam – awesome, thanks sir!
Sound great and I look forward to watching this develop!
Re: Voting for speakers/abstracts, I wonder if you need to let people vote in different streams, so it’s not all ‘indexing’ or ‘Level 500’ etc…. and also have a ‘First time Speaker’ stream to give the new guys a safe environment to make mistakes and learn.
Maybe also have a ‘Wild Card/ BrentO’s’ choice as well, as I’ve found that some of the best presentations can be the ones that you’ve attended by mistake or because there was nothing else on… and often that’s when you learn the most!
SQLBob – thanks, glad you like it. I totally get the curation thing, I just don’t want to go there for this project. I want it to be 100% community-driven – basically, for me to build something that’s sustainable, that the community wants, and then me be able to slowly step aside and let the project live on its own. (And when someone else is running it, I don’t want them picking the sessions either, hahaha.)
Voting: I’d love to see that as Stack Overflow style of voting & reputation. People could earn rep by attending, providing speaker feedback, presenting, etc.
In addition to making the idea scalable, it makes for a comfortable way to break in and contribute as you build up to presenting.
I’m in.
Andy – thanks sir! Yeah, exactly about the voting and reputation. I’m a huge fan of how Stack handles reputation (I’m even using it in a demo in class today!)
It is an excellent idea. I like to present something but not now. Although I would like to help any way I can.
Sounds like a fun idea and for the right price! I volunteer a submission “The Bootsy Collins Guide to Benchmarks and Bassline Collection”. Or perhaps “Who Let the Funk in Here? George Clinton Explains Parameter Sniffing”. I guess I have to get the P-Funk alumni onboard first, but details, details…
I’m in … a coworker and I have been working on a presentation abstract
Let me know how I can help. One thing I would add: an inexperienced speaker track, for lack of a better phrase. Keep giving new folks opportunities to share.
I’m in as a voter and attendee. This sounds great.
You had me at “transparent abstract review”.
https://twitter.com/RonDBA/status/790927748831281152
Hey Brent,
Interesting thought. Pluralsight runs something similar called Hack Summit (https://hacksummit.org/). It is a little different in that it is only one time a year and the speakers are curated, but the delivery of the content is completely virtual and it is all free (people can donate, but not required). Not sure on all the details of the platform they use, but happy to make a connection or ask some questions if that would be helpful.
Some thoughts:
1. It might be interesting to allow people to find other attendees near them if they want to setup watch parties and do some in-person networking.
2. Someone posted above the idea of rotating the time zone. I think that is an interesting idea. Or even hosting one in a non-english language
3. It may also be interesting to not only have voting on abstracts, but also have people submit ideas for sessions they would like to see and have people vote on those as well. Might give some insight to speakers on what people are struggling with.
4. I get that you do not want to curate content and leave it up to the people, but thinking that one idea could be to restrict the ability to submit a new session for X number of months if you have been chosen as a speaker.
5. One potential issue I could see is whether or not the free tools that you might have at your disposal are able to support the potential kind of load of users.
Happy to provide feedback and thoughts and possibly participate as a presenter (if the community would deem we worthy)
Andrew – thanks for the ideas! I’ll keep those in mind.
Yep, that’s definitely on the long term road map.
Definitely, that’s a possibility as well down the road.
Agreed!
That’s a hard no: I’m determined to let anybody submit anything at any time, and let the attendees choose. If they keep demanding a particular speaker again and again, and that speaker is willing to write material and volunteer their time, they’re in. (There will be a limit on repeat sessions from the same speaker back to back, though.)
Google Hangouts / YouTube Live is super-crazy-scalable, but I’m still debating whether to do that or GoToWebinar (which has a better experience, but caps out at 2k attendees.)
In agreement with many of the other posters, Brent. This is a great idea. Potentially quite scalable. Out of the box it will develop and mold overtime, based on the content quality and variety — and the voting! I’m in.
I’m in! :{>
I would be honored to help by presenting or moderating
I’m in as well.
Great idea! Count me in.
Whatever I can do to help, I will.
Totally in and would love to help out anyway I can. I question the free side. Not necessarily for the attendees but for the organization of the whole thing. If you want to step away at some point you’ll need some sort of sponsor plan to keep it going and funded. Just throwing out ideas. Would love to see this succeed and help out. 🙂
Pat – thanks! Yeah, for now I’ll be running it under the company (Brent Ozar Unlimited), because a lot of the resources leverage stuff we’d have anyway (WordPress hosting, GoToWebinar account, etc). It’s like Paste The Plan – my goal is to keep the costs low enough that it doesn’t ever need a separate sponsor, and we can just do it as a goodwill endeavor.
What shall we call this crazy idea? “Ozarcon” or something else? Maybe there could be a naming contest (similar to the renaming of AskBrent) to give this amazing thing a meaningful name. Nobody likes variables named like @variable. 🙂
HA! I do have a brand going already for it, with logo design in progress as we speak. News to come soon.
[…] free online database conference I wrote about two weeks ago now has a name: Group […]
I’m ready to contribute!
Love the idea and I’ll definitely submit if I can. That does depend on the planned time of day for the conference. I understand that you’ll probably target the USA first which puts me at a 6-9 hour challenge.
Also, I know how to present but not how to handle the streaming, Q&A, upload to YouTube, etc. If you have the tools to make this mostly plug and play for both presenters and attendees, it has a good chance of going big. But if people need to set up lots of stuff, install extra programs, and handle all kinds of technical issues, it will fail.
Hugo – thanks! Yeah, my goal is to make it plug-and-play for the presenters. I’ve done so many webcasts at this point that it’s brain-dead easy for me, so me being the co-host is a big key. We’ll use our GoToWebinar account, which gives us up to 2k attendees, HD video, VoIP & computer audio, and built-in recording. Pretty straightforward.
Awesome idea, Brent. Please be sure that potential participants are told what equipment will be required to produce a good video. I’d love to do it, but I’d want to be sure that I have all the things needed (like, can I use microphone built into my laptop or are those too tinny to use for presentation? what software do we need to get the thing recorded? (webex or ??)
Yep, check out the Speaker FAQ on there. 😀
Hi Brent, I would also provide a slot for the proposal with the least number of votes or a randomly chosen proposal. You can compare the score after delivery to the proposal score and somehow validate if proposal score is the right metric to chose which sessions are held.
Johan – interesting, but I think I’ll take a pass on that. I don’t think a single sample would do justice to that kind of decision.
Now, if you wanted to start your own event, you could run that experiment by simply randomly choosing sessions. 😀