Over the past few weeks, we've been working on setting up a virtual conference at Twilio Segment (shameless plug, come to CDP Week and check it out, it's free!). And for someone who's only done it a couple of times in my past life, let me tell you... it's a lot to remember!
You're having to find folks to speak. Then you have to ensure that you can marry their idea to the theme of the event. Then you're having to send out reminders to get their drafts in by Thursday. Then you're having to find out about what platform is going to be used for the event, and take a brief overview session to make sure you know where the knobs & levers are. THEN you're having the dry-run with the speakers, and don't forget your RoS (Run of Show) session! Do you know who's going to do introductions? Who's going to announce what? Who's got the Q&A curation? Uh oh, you might need another practice session with 1 or 2 of the speakers because they're not used to giving conference talks and they need more time to polish their work! Oh there's a status call with the event planning team, and they mentioned some kind of artwork needed for social media - make sure you get the details over to Creative!
As you can probably feel from that paragraph, there are lots of moving parts and it's easy to get lost in the details... to forget the "Why" in favor of answering the "How". I suppose there's a degree of this that's expected, especially for a less-experienced planner of events... but when it happens, it can really throw off your vibe.
Then you have THAT MOMENT.
You know the one I mean if you've experienced it. When you stop for a second, and breathe, and look around at all the moving parts coming together to make something that you're proud to be a part of. When you hear one of your speakers walk through their outline, and you can tell that this person is outside their comfort zone, but they're pouring themselves into it and doing great and their topic is absolute blazing fire and you suddenly go "OH. MY. GOSH. THIS is why I do what I do."
Epilogue
I tried a couple of ways to spin this into some sort of deep philosophical post about the core of DevRel and what it means to be a human who empathizes with those around you, but in the end I've decided to just cut it off there for tonight. I'm celebrating that I was a small part of someone else's win today and it made my day, and I'm just delighted to share it with you.
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