In March our entire events calendar disappeared in about two weeks. Coding Girls workshops, meetups, partner events: cancelled or postponed indefinitely. For a community built heavily around bringing people into one room, that could have been the end of the year.
Instead, it turned into the biggest thing we have done so far. From June 10 to 12 we ran the WomenTech Global Conference 2020 as a fully virtual event across all US and European time zones, with the ambition of connecting 100,000 women in tech, minorities and allies. Speakers from Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix and many more. Free to attend.
What it took behind the scenes
Anna led the community, the program and the partnerships. My side of it was the machinery. A virtual conference at this scale is mostly an infrastructure problem: registration flows that do not fall over, streaming that works for keynotes and parallel tracks, networking sessions that pair thousands of strangers without awkward silence, and email systems that keep everyone oriented across time zones.
A few things I learned the hard way:
- Peak load is the only load that matters. Averages are meaningless when 10,000 people click the same link in the same minute.
- Virtual attention is expensive. In a venue, people stay because they traveled. Online, you earn every additional minute. Format beats duration.
- Networking is the product. Talks can be watched later. The reason to attend live is the people, so speed networking got as much engineering attention as the main stage.
The pandemic forced the format, but I do not think we go back. A physical conference caps at the size of a hall. A virtual one caps at the size of the community, and ours turns out to be much bigger than any hall.