The Lanyrd Blog

New and improved: Lanyrd 2.0 for iPhone

2012-05-16T15:07:36+01:00

Download our shiny new, improved iPhone app for instant information about events you're attending. Organising an event? Use our free app to keep your attendees up to date.

Exciting news! You can now download our new and improved iPhone app from the App Store (or upgrade if you've installed our previous version). We've given the app a swish new design, and refreshed every part it to be smoother, cleaner and easier to understand.

Our new app does everything the old app did… but better. You can sign in to the app with Twitter to get all the power of Lanyrd.com in your pocket. Discover professional events and conferences that your friends are going to or interested in. If you use guides on Lanyrd.com the app will also show you upcoming events in guides you track.

Browse popular events on Lanyrd or search for specific events. Mark events you are interested in by clicking track or attend: all events that you track or plan to attend on Lanyrd will be automatically saved directly to your phone. These are saved complete with the schedule and attendee & speaker directories, ready for you whenever you need them even if you don't have WiFi.

As well as the shiny new design, here are some other improvements we have rolled out for version 2.0:

Better offline support; we store events you are attending or tracking offline and load them instantly - no need to wait for the conference wifi and more convenient for when you're out and about.
Suggested events; we have renamed this tab from "Contacts' events". We still show you suggested events that your contacts are going to or interested in, but we now also show you upcoming events that have been added to any guides you are tracking. This is similar to what we already do on lanyrd.com.
New "Profile" tab; this new tab shows your profile so you can easily see your information.
Better event schedules; we know lots of events have large schedules so we've redesigned the schedule page to make it easier for you to navigate. Events with long schedules can also now be searched.
Improved speaker pages; these now include more information on each speaker including their bio if we have it, which sessions they're speaking at, upcoming speaking engagements, and events they're attending or are involved with.
Improved attendee pages; similar to the speaker pages, these now include more information on each attendee, including their upcoming events. This provides you with more ways to connect with others during events
Share more! You can use our new "share" button to Tweet, email or share almost everything in the app, including the events, search and session pages. This makes it easy to share cool events you've found.
About; we've updated our about section with a bit of a design refresh and to give you more information about the application.

Screenshots of Lanyrd 2.0 for iPhone

Customise our app for your event

Our new app also has some exciting changes under the hood: we can now customise the listings for individual events, for example to show sponsor logos against an event page. This is a premium feature: please get in touch if you would like to take advantage of this for your own event. You can see an example of this on the Digital Shoreditch event page.

No iPhone? No problem!

We want you to have the best experience of Lanyrd, regardless of the device you have. We also have an HTML5 app that will work on your Blackberry, Android or Windows phone (and many other devices besides!).

Visit m.lanyrd.com on your phone. This HTML5 app does everything that our iPhone app does, including saving event details and schedules offline (if your device supports it). We will be rolling out an updated design to m.lanyrd.com shortly.

Get in touch

So whatever phone you use, you can always stay informed about the next great event and have all the details saved offline on your phone for when you need them.

Please let us know if you have any feedback. We are continually improving and would love to hear from you.

Week notes: Adventures in Amsterdam, for one of us anyway

2012-05-14T17:50:59+01:00

Jake has been entertaining attendees at Mobilism whilst the rest of us have been having a week of working on little bits and pieces.

Jake has been busy recently, he wrote an article for A List Apart and has been regaling those at this year’s Mobilism with details of his (mis)adventures with AppCache. If you're interested in learning more, check out Jake’s slides.

The rest of us have been having a bit of a clean up, with Natalie finishing off the design work for our soon-to-be-in-your-mitts refreshed iPhone app. Simon and Tom have started work on a new project, Operation C. I have been busy organising our upcoming office move. We’re not going far, just around the corner, but with a bit more space for us to spread out our seemingly endless supply of post-it’s.

For those of you who, like me, find the idea of giving a talk a somewhat terrifying experience you might like to check out Rachel Andrew’s excellent advice. I’m still not sure anyone will actually catch me on stage though.

And for those of you who want to see what’s been going on at Mobilism, here are the slides and videos.

Coverage from Mobilism 2012

Week notes: Links, bullets and coverage galore

2012-05-01T14:18:58+01:00

We've introduced a simple way of adding bullet points and links to content on Lanyrd. Plus, slides and video from RailsConf and The Next Web 2012.

Add some flare to your sessions

Now you can add links and bullet points to Lanyrd's session pages. We've turned on a simple mini-language for adding inline links and lists. You can try it out over here. Bullet point lists can be added like so:

* a bullet
* another bullet
* and another

Which will render as a proper bullet-pointed list, like this:

a bullet
another bullet
and another

We still automatically turn any URLs in the descriptions in to links, but you can now specify link text yourself using the following:

[http://example.com An example link]

Which will display like this: An example link.

Don't worry about remembering which comes first out of the URL or the text - either order works fine.

Last week in conference coverage

We're deep in to spring conference season now, and the slides and videos have been coming in thick and fast. RailsConf 2012 took place in Austin last week and our community has gathered 44 slide decks from the event - videos of the sessions expected to start going online this week.

Coverage from RailsConf 2012

Also last week was The Next Web, one of Europe's largest startup and entrepreneurship gatherings. They've published video from every one of the sessions on YouTube.

Coverage from The Next Web 2012

And finally, if you're in the mood for something a little shorter, the London Node.js User Group April meeting featured 10 lightning talks on Node.js and JavaScript related topics, all of which are were recorded and have now been published online.

Coverage from London Node.js User Group Meetup - April 2012

Weeknotes: improved session pages & speaker directories and upcoming iPhone design refresh

2012-04-23T20:48:23+01:00

This week we Launched the official Digital Shoreditch schedule site and set up automated testing of our JavaScript. We rolled out some improvements to our session pages and speaker directories. I also have a sneak peak for you of some screenshots of our iPhone refresh and a bit more on our design process.

We announced our official partnership with Digital Shoreditch this week (which as I am following in the time honoured tradition of posting week-notes on a Monday, is actually last week). This is what we have been busily working on for the past few weeks and it is lovely to see it all coming together now. This marks the first conference we have worked directly with to create a customised mini site similar to our offering for SXSW. If you fancy one of these for your own event please get in touch with us.

In building the new mini-site for Digital Shoreditch we have been streamlining some of the interfaces throughout the site. The most marked difference is probably the speaker directory and the speakers on the session pages.

The speaker directory used to just be a rather dull but functional column'ed list of the speakers at an event. This now works a lot more like our event attendee directory. Here's the old design:

I have expanded out the profile information for speakers, giving room for speaker biographies which we have turned on for RailsConf and Digital Shoreditch. Also new is space for more contextual information relevant to the speaker at the event such as which sessions they are presenting and a follow button for you to instantly follow on Twitter the speakers at an event. In addition to this you can search the speaker directory or filter by topic, for example here are all of the people talking about advertising at Digital Shoreditch. Here's what the new page looks like:

The session pages now have a similar component which replaces the previous speaker information display. I have moved the speaker information to below the session abstract, I feel this gives more prominence to the main purpose of the page and that having expanded speaker details below this provides qualitative context to the session. Here is a comparison of the old and new session page designs.

We have started the mammoth task that is tidying up our topics. We used to have 'opensource', 'Open Source', 'Open-source' and '"Open Source"' topics, now we just have 'Open Source' and all of the other pages redirect to the right place. We have done this to a few other topics, if you see any others that should be combined then please let us know.

Jake has had fun getting stuck into using PhantomJS and Qunit to set us up with some proper automated unit tests for JavaScript, which is fabulous!

Something else awesome that we all came across this week was the superb BeerCamp site! A splendid interactive book-style conference website stretching some darned funky CSS3 to the limits! Their 2011 site was pretty cool too (scroll down). Incidentally BeerCamp is on Lanyrd if you want to mark your interest.

I found this lovely description of design this week. It is targeted at startups and evangelises the need for startups to take design seriously and to have designers on the founding team, I agree with this sentiment. I have a Computer Science and front-end development background and while I am confident in my HTML/CSS abilities, design is something I have only been doing as long as I have been working on Lanyrd. I am learning all the time and have gone from saying I am 'not a designer' to 'I am an inexperienced designer', I can only imagine how much Lanyrd would have benefited if I had had more design experience before we started out on this adventure!

Continuing as an inexperienced designer, I got to play with Adobe Fireworks some more this week. We are doing a little bit of a visual refresh of our iPhone app at the moment. Rather than trying to straighten things up and make them look nice directly in Xcode, this time I decided it would be a lot less painful to try using Fireworks to mock up what I wanted them to look like.

I have been using this approach more and more recently, even on the web where I am happier than a pig in poo messing about with CSS and designing in the browser. I find it changes the way in which I think about design, instead of contemplating class names and inheritance I am able to take a step back and think abstractly about colour, typography, alignment and other creative things.

Here is a sneak peak of the direction I am taking with the iPhone app visual refresh: (Please note: it might not look anything like this by the time I'm finished!)

And here is a video of the paper prototyping process I went through to design the first version of the iPhone app (which incidentally Simon and I designed, built and shipped in 4 weeks having never done iPhone app development before!)

I have made good use of these fabulous layered fireworks templates of iPhone widgets recently and these paper kits for mobile prototyping also look really fun though I have not played with them yet.

A useful trick that you might not know: getting designs of iPhone screens onto the iPhone is a right pickle! So I have been exporting the PNG screens to my Dropbox folder and then using the Dropbox iPhone app to view them on my phone. You can even save them to your camera roll or view them on other test devices if you have them.

The Lanyrd quest for a Graphic and UX Designer (more experienced than me) continues in earnest, we are in the interviewing stage at the moment so if you are dilly–dallying about applying then you better get your CV/Resume and portfolio in quick!

Digital Shoreditch 2012: Schedule powered by Lanyrd

2012-04-17T16:17:50+01:00

We're proud to announce our first Technology Partner relationship, with Digital Shoreditch 2012 here in London. Lanyrd is powering the official schedule for the festival.

The Digital Shoreditch festival, now in it's second year, celebrates the outstanding creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent of East London and Tech City. This year's festival is looking to be even bigger and better than last year and we're pleased to have been asked to power their official schedule for the event.

The schedule mini site includes the entire schedule to help you find the great sessions and events that interest you. What's more, we've integrated with Eventbrite so you can book tickets for events as you browse through the schedule. We've also provided a searchable attendee directory to help you find the right people to meet.

Grab your tickets now

The Digital Shoreditch Festival runs for 12 days this year. You can buy a pass for the whole festival, or you can book individual day passes for free with a refundable £90 deposit. Each day covers a different theme — check out the Digital Shoreditch site for details, then use our session planner to figure out which days are right for you.

Explore and plan your festival with ds2012.lanyrd.com

Sign into ds2012.lanyrd.com with Twitter and we'll instantly show you which sessions your contacts are presenting, attending or just interested in. When you see an event you'd like to attend, simply click the buy link and we'll whisk you off to Eventbrite so you can grab your ticket.

Search and filtering

With such a fun-packed schedule we want to make it easy for you to find sessions and events that interest you. You can search through all the events during the festival by taking advantage of our filtering interface, all powered by topic metadata. Check out all the events around Emerging Technology, Marketing or Start-ups.

Searchable attendee directory

Our searchable attendee directory makes it easy for you to find the types of people you'd like to meet at the festival. You can easily search for people who share the same interests, for example are you a branding buff? Or do you work in education or for a charity? You can also just look for all of people you know who are attending Digital Shoreditch.

Local company? Host an Open Office

If you're a company in the Shoreditch area there's still time to get involved in the festival. Sign-ups for the Digital Shoreditch open house programme are still being accepted — so if you want to invite the Digital Shoreditch community to visit your office or studio you can make it happen.

Want something similar for your event?

If you're organising a conference or festival and you think Lanyrd can help, please do drop us a line at info@lanyrd.com — we'd love to hear from you.

For further details of our Digital Shoreditch offering, take a look at our Digital Shoreditch press pack.

Weeknotes: Short, and kinda funny-looking

2012-04-16T11:36:12+01:00

Another Monday, another "I was supposed to have done this on Friday" set of weeknotes!

It was a short week, as Monday was an Easter bank holiday. In hindsight, I don't remember the week as having been shorter, so I guess we achieved a lot of things. I spent half the week working on a revision to the Lanyrd iPhone app - it's been falling a little behind relative to the main web site, so we're looking into ways to make it more flexible and able to cope with new features. Everyone else has been working on general site improvements in preparation for Digital Shoreditch, which will be happening down the road from our office at the end of May / beginning of June.

In "conferences in unexpected places" news, AntarcticJS was added to Lanyrd, leading Jake to discover that we didn't have a proper flag for Antarctica in the database. I have a feeling it's also going to break some code that naïvely assumes that the earth is flat. Geography is terribly inconvenient sometimes - I really should move to a planet with simpler geometry.

Simon's ongoing enthusiasm for "plus-oneing all of the things" led to buttons on all the session pages that let you plug sessions on most of the major social networks.

More generally, we've started using Github's pull request support for a few of our new features, and it's extremely nice to use - I've found the ability to be sarcastic about individual lines of changed code invaluable, and once everything looks good you can merge a branch into trunk by clicking a single button. Very nice indeed. We're not using it for everything, because I personally prefer just developing directly in trunk for most stuff, but the big things that warrant a branch are benefitting.

We're trialling Eventbrite support in a few places - you can't add it to conferences yourself yet, but you can get yourself tickets for PuntCon VIII through its Lanyrd page. Hopefully this will quickly evolve to the point that all conference pages can have it. Let us know if you want to try it out for your conference.

JSConf 2009

Simon spent Sunday finding and attaching coverage from JSConf 2009. Apparently it's his new hobby. I spent Sunday hung-over. That's my new hobby.

Coverage from JSConf 2009

Some links to pad things out a little

As I do most of the sysadmin round here, I was also intrigued by mosh, an SSH "replacement" (not a full replacement, as it's still tunelling connections over SSH, as far as I can tell) that is a lot more resilient to network problems and can cope with changing IP addresses. It'll probably also be extremely useful for SSHing into servers over dodgy conference wifi connections, which will be terribly useful for fixing things that break. Servers love breaking when everyone who knows how to fix them has terrible connectivity.

Speaking of dodgy wifi, Wikipedia describes a Hack Day as "an event in which computer programmers and others in the field of software development, like graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software-related projects". I think this makes them sound rather more serious than they actually are, personally, but there you go. But if you're organizing a hack day, the Hack Day Manifesto makes for excellent reading. A lot of the points listed are also excellent advice for people running any other sort of nerd-centric conference, honestly, and the ridiculous amount of detail applied to "how to make the network work" on this page should not be taken lightly..

Finally, here's a picture of a shaved llama.

Weeknotes: Coverage searches, JSConf, writing talks, browser performance & SVG

2012-04-06T19:17:36+01:00

Hey, it's Jake here, bloggin' at'cha! I've just returned from JSConf with a serious case of the jetlags to find it's my turn to write the weeknotes. I'm literally nodding off as I write this.

We've launched a nice little feature on coverage search pages, the ability to filter by source site, eg here's a search for JavaScript slides specifically from speakerdeck.com. Hats off to Simon & Tom for their work on the faceted search stuff, there's loads more to come out of that.

JSConf US 2012

I've spent the last few days over at JSConf in Scotsdale, AZ. I arrived slightly tired and grumpy, but soon burned through that after a brilliant two days of breakfast burritos, tech/social/political debate, many beers and one mechanical bull. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, there was also this lot...

Coverage from JSConf 2012

Keep an eye on our JSConf coverage page as more slide decks, notes & eventually videos are added. If I were to pick a couple that really got me thinking, one would be JavaScript on the GPU, as I'm fascinated yet not overly knowledgeable when it comes to GPU stuff. The other, Build Anything. I usually find HTML5 round-up talks a little samey, but this one shunned a lot of the 'shiny shiny' and instead looked at features often missed, such as drag & drop uploading (*stares at Twitter*).

The first session of the conference was simply titled "FIREWORKS", which had us all worried that Chris Williams hadn't quite considered the disruptive amount of sunlight on offer in Scottsdale. To everyone's surprise the fireworks came in the form of a Samsung Nexus S phone preloaded with a development build of Boot to Gecko. Currently, performance isn't good enough to inspire me to build apps on it, it's significantly slower than Firefox running on my Galaxy Nexus so I imagine it just hasn't been optimised yet. If they can make it perform like Safari on iOS (or better, even), I'll be all over it, because let's face it, the current performance of transitions on Android is abysmal in comparison. You might not need smooth flowing graphics to get excited about a new mobile platform, so don't let me deter you from checking it out.

Writing talks - a good excuse to learn something & write some code

I'd like to point out I fell asleep over my keyboard at this point, and woke up in my bed some 13 hours later. I guess I zombied my way there. Yey for jetlag!

I'm bad when it comes to finishing projects, I've normally seen a new shiny thing before then that I'd rather play with. I've found writing talks a great way to force myself to see something through, as the fear of a bad review is greater than my desire to go do something else. I take advantage of this fear by picking subjects that require a lot of experimentation and research, then try to be a bit ambitious with the slides.

With my fonts talk I took the opportunity to learn how font files are constructed and how different OSs use them, and I recorded myself building some of my slides in Deluxe Paint III on the Amiga. With my JSConf talk "AppCache: Douchebag", I'd already done most of the research for Lanyrd's mobile site and wrote it up as an article for A List Apart (which is working it's way through the ALA queue, stay tuned), so I had a bit more time to throw at my slides.

Take a look at what came up with in Chrome (preferably Chrome Canary), press space to advance slides. I built it to run locally, so it'll look a bit odd as images, fonts etc load in. You can also take a peek at the code driving that example. It's not something I expect other people to use, it was for my own entertainment. If you're looking for something to use yourself, you'd be much better off with something like Lea Verou's CSSS.

Performance wins

Aside from my first ever talk at @media, where I used PowerPoint (yes, I know), my previous slides have been custom-built in Flash/Adobe Air. Now, if you could just stop stabbing me with that pitchfork for a second, I'll explain myself. Back then I worked on a Windows box at home, but did bits of development on an Ubuntu laptop during my commute. I wanted something that worked on both, performed well for animation and gave me a lot of control. Flash was a great fit, and open source through the Flex compiler. I tried to switch to HTML a few times but the performance was terrible in comparison. That's no longer the case, bleeding-edge browsers have overtaken Flash in animation performance.

There are a few innovations that made this happen. IE9 showed everyone what could be done with hardware acceleration in the browser, I (by then a mac user) was shocked to see IE9 running in a VM kicking the arse of Chrome and Firefox running natively. Naturally the other browsers starting playing catchup, having to cater for multiple platforms. Firefox made some terrific gains, on Windows especially, and gave us requestAnimationFrame which attempts to sync redraws to screen refresh rates and processor activity. Chrome then steamed ahead and started running CSS transitions mostly on GFX hardware & adopted requestAnimationFrame, but the biggest win came when they mixed the two together.

In current stable versions of Chrome, CSS transforms happen on a 40hz timer, you can actually get smoother 60hz performance using requestAnimationFrame and changing the values yourself, this isn't the case in Chrome Canary. This gave me a cross-platform browser that had beyond-Flash graphical performance.

The API is an experiment and a little crazy. It's based around how I plan my talks, nested lists. I start out with vague sections, then nest in the details, then move things around if necessary. The nesting lets me keep track of what's detail and what's structure.

Why not use keynote/CSSS/whatever?

Building this whole thing was simply an excuse to get more experience with bleeding edge stuff that I don't get to play with during my day job. Sure, I don't need to build a slide deck to play with this stuff, but doing so gave me a real-world use-case and more importantly, a deadline that couldn't slip.

I have nothing against other side tools, I just, well, enjoy coding.

Progressive drawing with SVG

One of the things I got with Flash was easy vector animation. Trying to do something similar natively in the browser was a good excuse to play with SVG. In the example of my slide framework thing, an arrow is drawn to bring attention to part of a slide. I learned how to do progressive drawing from Carto:net. Their code is pretty horrible, but the technique is fascinating. A line is given the illusion of drawing progressively by making it a dashed line, where the length of the dash is the size of the line, and the length of the gap is the same. The offset of the dash is animated, pushing the dash into the line, and the gap out of the line. Here's the code I used to progressively draw SVG paths.

I was so entertained by this trick that I used it to progressively draw, pretty much everything, including a diagram explaining how Application Cache works. I created the diagram mostly using Inkscape, which is certainly from the Linux school of UX design, but gives you a lot of control over the SVG output as you draw.

A custom build of Chromium

If you had a look at the example you'll see it tries to launch a pop-up window. I move this popup onto my laptop screen for slide-by-slide notes. However, if you switch Chrome into fullscreen mode on OSX Lion, it does so natively, rendering the second screen unusable (FANKS APPLE). I could have switched to Firefox, which doesn't do Lion-native fullscreen, but I unhappy with the performance and figured native fullscreen would be in Firefox shortly.

Instead I built my own browser! Well, actually, I modified Chromium, essentially changing a line from if (isLion) to if (isLion && false), but I still felt I nerd-levelled up as I watched my laptop physically shaking and melting the table as it built Chromium.

My own build meant I had a bleeding edge browser that I could test and then rely upon on the day of my talk. I browsed through my talk in Chrome Canary on the morning of JSConf and it had a complete freak-out & crashed on one slide, so, err, glad that didn't happen on stage.

Right, I think I'll stop writing before this becomes any more self-indulgent than it already is. If you made this far, cheers & have a good weekend!

Week notes: Digital Shoreditch and JavaScript fireworks

2012-04-02T13:57:38+01:00

This week is all about how we're gearing up to provide the Digital Shoreditch schedule and how I've been off learning how to make fireworks with JavaScript.

This May Digital Shoreditch is back with two weeks of creative goodness and Lanyrd will be providing the schedule across the festival. Having just come back from SXSW Interactive, this is perfect timing for us. We'll be creating a similar session guide and putting some of the feedback we've had after Austin to good use. Keep your eyes peeled for more news on the events involved in the festival over the next few weeks.

Jake is spending this week at JSConf, regaling attendees with tales of his (mis)adventures with AppCache. He has made sure there is a suitable amount of his usual 'fourth form' humour to keep everyone entertained. If you're there, do say hello to him. He might even have a couple of Lanyrd lanyards with him to give away.

I spent a lovely couple of days at home in Brighton at the end of last week on Seb Lee-Delisle's Creative JavaScript for non-coders workshop. It was a super couple of days of making pretty fireworks, learning what arrays are, and objects, and basically making a number of lightbulbs go off in my head in that "Oh, so that's what they were talking about" kind of way. I'd recommend it to anyone to wants to get a kickstart into making beautiful things with code, especially if you've never tried before.

Slides from IA Summit 2012

Interested in Information Architecture or User Experience? Browse through these 49 slide decks from IA Summit 2012.

Coverage from IA Summit 2012

How to run an unconference

2012-03-26T13:46:25+01:00

Are you ready to run your own unconference? We’re here to walk you through a checklist of things to consider before getting started.

Our advice comes with a healthy dose of hints and tips from two seasoned unconference organisers. Salim Virani has been organising Leancamp since 2010 and Cristiano Betta who runs the popular BarCamp London series.

Let’s start. Close your eyes. Imagine you’ve organised an unconference. People are gathering to share what they know, there’s collaboration, there’s pizza, the projectors are whirring and there’s a buzz of enthusiasm in the air.

Ok. You can open your eyes again. Are you ready to make it happen?

For the people, by the people.

The main point of running an unconference (see wikipedia) is to create a space that helps people make connections, share knowledge, collaborate and create brainchildren. To take part, attendees are encouraged to give a presentation, create a discussion, or even chair a debate.

There are a few different breeds of unconference. You might want to run with your own unique vision, or you could jump on the bandwagon and use a formula that’s already out there. There’s everything from the BarCamp ‘sleeping under desks in a sleeping bag’ style to a one-day gathering in an office.

The basics.

Now that you’re ready to start organising, you need to make sure you have the basics in place. You’re going to need:

at least ten hours to organise it and a sensible amount of lead-time (Cristiano suggests six weeks for a BarCamp)
a team of volunteers who all have a strong sense of their responsibilities
a place to gather and space to collaborate that caters for your attendees’ human needs
a way to fund it, whether it’s from your own pocket, through company sponsorship or ticketing
a clear plan for how to market your unconference and communicate with your attendees

1: Find a place to gather

You can be as creative as you like with the location. Unconferences have been held in abandoned buildings, university campuses, regular office blocks and even campsites - but you might want to ask yourself a few practical questions before settling on anything too unconventional.

If you’re planning to organise an overnight unconference you need to do some serious thinking before you sell any tickets. As well as observing basic human rights to sanitation, ability to exit the building freely etc. you need to be sure that you can adhere to any health and safety requirements, security procedures and fire regulations. To figure out what’s possible, you must have a close tête-à-tête with the people who are responsible for the space and make sure you clearly manage their expectations. If possible, get the constraints in writing.

Here are some of the basic questions that you need answers to before going ahead:

What’s the level of security access? (people may want to come and go as they please)
Does it have several rooms of different sizes?
Are there toilet, washing and kitchen facilities?
Is there access for disabled attendees?
Is there access to power, wifi and audiovisual equipment?

2: How to fund it?

As the chief of the whole endeavour you’re going to need to keep your wits about you when handling the budget. One of the major pitfalls when it comes to money is where it gets stored. Beware that PayPal and Google Checkout sometimes like to hold onto some of your money until the event is complete. Make sure you have enough cash in your hands to pay for the essential stuff, and that includes the pizzas.

The sponsorship route

You’re probably familiar with the tiered sponsorship structure, where you offer sponsors varying levels of publicity throughout your unconference. Sponsorship need not just be about money though, sponsors can also contribute food, drink or other supplies. Cristiano’s hot tip is to “keep in mind that most companies have at least a 4 week payment period. If you want to get paid before the event you better start early”.

Whether you take on the role of seeking out sponsors, or you delegate the task to a volunteer (preferably a well-connected experienced community member), your main duty is to be consistent in acknowledging your sponsors and making them feel like they’re getting the love they deserve.

Charging for tickets

Salim has chosen to make Leancamp a paid ticket event. This is his rationale.

“If participants are willing to pay, it allows the organiser to focus on the event itself. It also can shorten the time it takes since you don't have to depend on sponsorship approvals. Also, events proceed more smoothly because the cashflow is positive, rather than negative while you wait for sponsors to pay. When we did have sponsors, it was down to cold-calling and asking other organisers for introductions.”

3: Get the word out there, get bookings.

Using an intricate mélange of Eventbrite (the current ticketing system of choice), Twitter, Facebook, MailChimp, relevant group mailing lists and a website (perhaps knocked together in blog-style with a basic tool like Tumblr) you’re ready to start getting people to book tickets… and, ahem we think Lanyrd is a great way to notify people and bring the community together before the event kicks off.

According to Salim, this is the most challenging part of the job. He believes in attracting attendees through word of mouth and his personal network. He says: “we aim to create knowledge sharing between different communities and disciplines. We’re constantly inviting people from new groups to participate”.

There are two hard and fast rules when it comes to putting the word out there:

Rule 1: Make it ultra-clear how people can book
Rule 2: Give it a great description that inspires people and helps them recognise whether it’s relevant to them.

A small digression about preventing no-shows

‘No-shows’ are an unfortunate side-effect of offering free tickets, perhaps because people sometimes value free things less. Here are some ways to reduce the number of people who take their ticket for granted:

BarCamps often use the timed-release method – this means only dedicated individuals make themselves available at a particular time to snap up tickets as soon as they are released. This is great for attracting people who are ‘on it’.

The paid ticket – this is a controversial one in the unconferencing world but it works for Salim’s Leancamp. He says “We have almost no no-shows. Charging means you know the participants are committed.”

Pre-investment – set up collaborative tasks, pre-event competitions or other ways to lure attendees into feeling like your unconference is the chance to show off their work. Use Lanyrd to publish this info, and get people to publish little blurbs about their planned talks.

Cristiano ran a genius scheme with Spreadshirt: “We gave attendees vouchers to get their own shirts printed, which led to a higher turnup rate for people that had created their shirts.”

Pairing up with another event – if there’s another conference in town, your unconference could be the perfect fringe event, particularly if you want encourage people from out of town to stay a day longer or if you’re hoping that industry hot-shots will come and share their expertise.

4: Before the day: The walk-through

You’re going to find that you’re building up quite an eclectic shopping list of things to buy, borrow or rent (hopefully not steal) for your unconference, so the best idea is to do either a mental or physical walk-through of the space you’re going to be using. Try thinking about the day from start to finish and make notes as you go. Think about some of these things:

How people will display their talk details (the grid system is the most common)
Food and eating equipment
Stationery
Furniture
Electrical equipment: extension leads and adapters etc.
First aid
Badges and Lanyards (of course)

Setting up the grid

Natalie Downe is a veteran of dozens unconferences, and helped organise (and select stationery for) BarCamp London 2. Here are her tips on setting up the perfect unconference grid:

The grid view starts out as a blank schedule for the event, with rooms along one axis and times along the other. Most weekend BarCamps I have seen have split Saturday and Sunday into two separate boards and put rooms along the top and time slots down the left. Next to each of the rooms you should mark the capacity so that people can choose an appropriately sized room for their talk. You should also mark which rooms have projectors and whiteboards.

Mark out the breaks and the introductory and closing talks with masking tape or athletic tape (so as not to damage the walls), then leave spaces for each of the sessions. You should expect at least 75-80% of people going to give talks (everyone is supposed to but you will have people that won't). The slots should be 30 minutes or at most 45 - encourage attendees to "hack the grid" - combining similar talks in to one slot, or even merging two slots if they think their session demands the extra time.

Leave gaps for the talks and provide each attendee with an index card, some Blu-Tack and lots of colourful stationary to decorate and personalise their slot with. Encourage the attendees to include the title of the talk, their name and Twitter handle as well as the names of anyone else presenting the talk with them. Information about topics covered and and level of experience required is also good.

Don't open the grid until after the introductory talk, to ensure everyone understands how it works and has a fair chance at grabbing the right slot for their session.

5: Keeping it real. During the event.

According to Cristiano a great conference organiser is “A good mix of beloved community manager and benevolent dictator”. You’re the event organiser, so it’s important not to exude too much stress during the day. Be nice to everyone, especially your team of volunteers.

To help create buzz, get messages out there, build enthusiasm and a greater sense of community, make sure you encourage your attendees to share their innermost feelings online:

Use a Twitter hashtag – make sure everyone knows what it is before people get there
Use Flickr – make sure people know where to post their photos too
Document anything remarkable on your blog – particularly in the run up to the unconference
Use Lanyrd – make sure people have publicised what their talk is going to be about

You may also want to consider taking videos and podcast recordings for posting online at a future date. This will do wonders for publicity and can help encourage future sponsors, particularly if you hope to run another one. Encouraging your attendees to collect their slides, notes and videos on Lanyrd (see BarCamp London 8's coverage for a great example) is a useful way to build an online record of what happened at the event.

6: Ready, set, get started.

Right. Now that you have the tools, it’s time to get started. When we asked Salim how best to get started, he replied:

“Start now. Just go for it. Experiment with the format as you go. Make sure each event is maximising your learning about how to it better next time. Don't be afraid to try new things, or to reject the status quo.”

Good luck. And don’t forget to post your unconference details on Lanyrd.

Week notes: SXSW, the aftermath

2012-03-25T23:45:37+01:00

Slides and audio from SXSW, videos from PyCon, recovering from jetlag and tinkering about under Lanyrd's hood.

So that's SXSW Interactive over for another year. It was every bit as enormous as we expected, made more intense by the weather driving all 20,000+ attendees indoors for the first few days. This year we took the team out, rented an apartment near the convention center, hacked, ate a LOT of meat and tried to make the most of the sunshine while it lasted.

Our unofficial SXSW session guide proved a big hit at this year's conference, and we even scored a couple of mentions as one of the top apps of SXSW 2012:

The Hot Apps At SXSW: Highlight And Lanyrd on the Rackspace blog, including a dynamic walking-down-the-corridor interview with myself and Robert Scoble.
Crosswa.lk and LaunchRock post the winning apps of SXSW: Lanyrd, Highlight and… WOMzit? on The Next Web

Over the past week people have been using Lanyrd to collect together slides, notes and audio from the event - and our collection currently stands at 125 slide decks, 425 audio recordings, 49 sketch notes and a bunch of other notes and write-ups. If you know of any that are missing please don't hesitate to sign in and add them to the corresponding session pages.

Coverage from SXSW Interactive 2012

Now that we're safely back in the office we're looking forward to rolling a bunch of the features we trialled at SXSW back in to the rest of the site - so watch this space for updates.

Paying off some technical debt

We've spent the week since we got back paying off some of the technical debt that's accumulated over the past few months. We've upgraded the site to Django 1.3... just in time for version 1.4 to come out and leave us out of date again. Thankfully the next update should be pretty straight forward - the Django team do an amazing job keeping upgrade pains to a minimum.

Since bringing Tom on board our infrastructure has evolved from a terrifying mess of digital duct tape to something more akin to a well-oiled machine. We made it through SXSW without any downtime at all, mainly thanks to Tom looking at a graph, saying "that doesn't look good enough" and firing up a couple of extra servers to handle the extra load (thanks, puppet).

We've been using Munin for most of our graphing, but Tom's latest infrastructure project is an installation of Graphite which makes graphing anything and everything even easier. We've rolled out several performance improvements informed by our new Graphite-powered graphs, so the effort has already started to pay off.

Slides and video from PyCon US 2012

We write most of our code in Python at Lanyrd, and I was sad that PyCon US, the annual Python community conference overlapped with SXSW again this year. Thankfully the PyCon team did an amazing job recording and publishing full videos from 94 talks at the conference, and we've also indexed 31 slide decks to go with the talks. If you're only going to watch one video from that conference, I'd suggest checking out Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes. Computer vision has never been so useful.

Coverage from PyCon US 2012