# Astro Conf early notes

## Q2 Goals
Public announcement during Q2 launch week including:
- date(s)
- theme/format
- initial speakers/sponsors
- landing page (full site not needed at this point)
- CFP announcement (if not full details, method for receiving submissions etc.)

## Known details
- Q3 Launch week event
- September 16 - 20 is the tentative launch week (could move one week earlier, but not likely)
- Can be how we announce launch week items
- virtual / online particiation only

## Undecideds

- Single "day" or multiple connected days?
- Ratio of live to pre-recorded stuff
- How to handle internationalization (time zones, languages)
- invited speakers vs CFP?
- (will depend on what kind of 'talks' we even decide to have)
- CFP for lightning talks only?
- "CFA" - Call for Answers to set questions: people submit responses and we use this to create video content

## Typical Conf logistics

- code of conduct
- registrations
- promotion
- coordination with speakers (private Discord thread?)
- sponsorship
- design/graphics/funky video interludes

### Tech

Leaning towards [StreamYard](https://streamyard.com/) to give us the most flexibility of recorded plus some live opportunities (cut to people live, watch party, in-event banter, some live Q & A sessions)



## Content Ideas - brain dump
Ideas/things people mentioned:

- live chat stream like #birthday
- giveaways/promotions
- Lightning Talks:
- announce or introduce your thing?
- "chair yoga" health/mental health
- remote leadership/working remote etc. (more practical)
- Big Name Friends
- talks about their use of Astro
- live stream building something with Astro
- Showcase of cool things built
- To show the scale/breadth
- "Big" sites, unusual sites/apps
- "State of Astro" keynote by Fred
- Where Astro is now, where it's going
- very high level, motivation-y
- "Astro Internals" / Deep Dive content
- compiler walk through
- dev tools walk through (e.g. how Volar is included)
- Contributing Speed Run
- Set up dev environment
- create tests
- Community Talks from other project maintainers
- adding auth with Clerk/Lucia
- improving performance with Astro Font

- Workshops
- Florian: Astro Integration Kit
- Martin: View Transitions
- Ben: Cool Content Collections / DB
- Astronaut Launchpad
- a dedicated slot for developers to announce / introduce new projects of their own. A bit like a [Nintendo Direct (partner showcase)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9y1AXICddE).
- Panel Discussions
- Behind the scenes stories (planned? Q and A?) from Astro Core
- "One more thing"/announcements of Launch Week items

### Larger/community efforts
- watch parties
- send shots from a live cam?
- arrange swag ahead of time

- conference website theme/template
- build in public/ahead of time?
- use that as conf material/launch item/reveal?

### Participation opportunities

What kind of participation would you want and (BE HONEST) actually do:
- I would participate in a live chat thread while the event is happening
- I would submit questions in advance for panel/Q and A type stuff.
- I would submit questions/comments or even RESPONSES to questions in real time, DURING an event
- I would chat in smaller breakout rooms
- I would "live-tweet" (fediverse, instagram etc.) the event with a hashtag
- If there were the option to turn my webcam on and have my face shown in a big "crowd" of attendees while the event was happening (think big zoom call), I would actually turn my web cam on and "participate" by showing my face
- I would actually attend, mostly paying attention, from start to finish, and not just catch up on the replay/recording later
- add your own testimonial to the conference website

## Notes from other conferences

### WordFestLive
https://www.wordfest.live/2022/march/

Format: 24 hrs live, speakers from every continent, single track
Schtick: "A celebration of YOU, the WordPress community. You'll find sessions focused on WordPress, remote working, and your mental well-being."
Fee: free, with optional $10 donation (funds go to a charity) when registering
Content:
- "Community Interviews" 15min (LOTS OF THESE) (vs prepared talks)
- broad web dev interest ("5 quick design tips" and "Why you really do need website performance as a mind set" and "Reduce/Reuse/Recycle: repurposing your social media content" including sustainability "Zero waste Web design" and "How can we make technology more sustainable")
- topics related to remote working ("Remote leadership" and "chair yoga")
- mental health sessions ("Dealing with the emotional impact of public-facing roles" "Work/Life balance while open-sourcing" "Dealing with Epillepsy & mental health disorders in the tech space")
- Personal stories/CTA: "Contributing to WordPress - how one free turn could turn out to be one of your smartest investments ever"

Notes:
- Testimonials after the fact on the web page (COLLECT THESE)
- To fill 24 hours of content, there were several tangential topics covered, and many of these were interviews vs. having people do prepared talks. This is a good way to get "coverage" of the time zones (lots of cONtEnT) without necessarily demanding too much of "speakers"
- idea: "CFA: Call for ANSWERS" - splicing together prerecorded answers to questions in advance gives us LOTS of material to work with.
- Doesn't have to be one day event: other things that "didn't make the cut" can be pre-(promoting/hype) events, or e.g. extra talks not showed live during, but made available for later viewing

### Frontend Nation
https://frontendnation.com/

Format: 4 days (Day 4 = live workshops), 6hrs/day, multitrack
Schtick: "The epic online gathering for frontend developers! Master the latest frameworks, learn from the best, and connect with a global community. It's free. It's global. It's beyond epic."
Fee: free
Content:
- traditional talks
- panels
- Q & As
- hands-on coding
- no holds barred -- fill up that conference with over 100 talks!
- CFP *and* invited speakers

Notes:
- Great promo/social game: ask speakers for 20second promo/intro, short interview ahead of time recorded for more promo material
- 
- "Swag page" for claiming offers from partners: https://vuejsnation.com/swag

### ViteConf
https://viteconf.org

Format: 24hrs (12 recorded hours played twice), single track; pre-conf talks
Schtick: "Learn how frontend teams are building the next generation of the web with Vite."
Fee: free
Content:
- all individual speaker prepared talks, woven into one recording
- some prerecorded "intermission" content: banter, break content
- only live component was single Discord thread (but, the heart of the program!)

Notes:
- decidedly for "The Vite Community", no need to go broader and try to appeal to or bring in new audience
- didn't want to split the audience/attention: single track, one big live chat thread, everyone all in one place
- didn't want to use a gated platform, make people go outside thier own community
- other than time/labour, the only outside hire was to produce the 12hr video stream (slides, CTA, audio equalizing among talks etc.)
- have decided NO MORE PANELS: harder to coordinate, harder to ensure diversity because you need all people to be able to talk about the same thing at once (vs individual talks where anyone can talk about their own thing), we don't need the content and in order for it to be any good, needs to be way longer than the 20min slot anyway
- if doing again, would do as an outside/sister event maybe 1 week before to promote
- NEED TO INCLUDE MORE BREAKS
- breaks to let people actually leave the screen
- maybe smaller inter-talk content? (slides/promos)
- Liked the model of Svelte Summit: one long video (4.5 hrs), so relaxed, very community oriented, not a big massive production
- thinking of giving $200 to local orgs to print their own stickers, have watch parties

### Svelte Summit
https://www.sveltesummit.com/

Format: 5ish hours of recorded talks, single track, with *live* "banter" between talks
Schtick: "Svelte Summit is a bi-annual conference focusing on Svelte and it's ecosystem."
Fee: free
Content:
- Pre-recorded talks, some 5min, some 15min
- Live "commentary" (Waldorf/Stadler) between some of the talks
- Comments from the live YouTube stream chat occasionally shown on screen (during the banter)
- LOW production value (don't really care what things look like, lighting etc)
- Always finishes with a talk from Rich Harris (joking at the beginning that he was still writing his, so perhaps his is live?)

## "Developer Thriving" Theory/Research

IDEA: If developers feel unmotivated, unproductive and unrecognized by their work/organization, even though we are not their job, can we provide opportunities that give developers a sense of belonging, agency and success through our open-source project that they might be missing.

Specifically, can we structure "Astro Conf" so that it is not just passively "attending a conference" but instead taps into what developers need to thrive and allow them to experience "thriving" in *our* environment?

<figure style="border: thin #c0c0c0 solid;
display: flex;
flex-flow: column;
padding: 5px;
margin: auto;">
<img src="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/SksYSeuxA.jpg" alt="Components of the Developer Thriving Framework: Agency, Learning culture, Motivation & self-efficacy, Support & belonging" />
<figcaption style=" background-color: #F1F1F1;
color: #black;
font: italic smaller sans-serif;
padding: 3px;
text-align: center;">Illustration: <a href="https://www.cher.cloud/">Cher Cloude Topps</a> for <a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/developer-success-lab">Developer Success Lab</a></figcaption>
</figure>



Hicks, C., Lee, C. S., & Ramsey, M. (2023). Developer Thriving: The four factors that drive Software Developer Productivity across Industries, 35-36 [Research Paper](https://www.pluralsight.com/resource-center/guides/developer-thriving-research-paper)

### Agency

- if our community might struggle to find "agency" in their own work, can this conference give them... a voice? something to "own"? a community where they feel they can participate/contribute?

### Motivation & Self-Efficacy

- if seeing tangible progress when working on code (the type they want to work on) is motivating, can we involve our community in projects that benefit Astro while making it easy for community members to see where and how they can contribute according to their skills/interests?
- e.g. We need a conference website, and *everyone* is an Astro developer! Can we coordinate building the website in public, with the community, and using the conference to showcase what and how we built? Can we release a conference website theme/template after the fact that people can feel pride, ownership in/of?

### Learning Culture

- people want to learn!
- They also want to share *what* they have learned, both to have pride in what they did and also to help others.
- can we create a culture of learning during the conf: a way to share what they learned, to thank those who taught them, to allow learners to immediately *use* their learning and pass it along to others?

### Supporting and Belonging

- supported to grow/learn/develop (which involves making mistakes) and accepted for who they are
- can we have conf badges *related to new skills unlocked* or new things learned during the conference? e.g. does each session come with a snaggable badge, "I leveled up my CSS with Chris"

### Developers should be mindful about how they support their teammatess' learning, belonging and other key factors in crusial collaboration moments

- how can participation be COLLABORATIVE, and SUPPORTIVE OF OTHERS?
- live chat stream: can questions be pointed to ensure people are shouting out others? mentioning other projects they use and find valuable? providing positive feedback?

### Developers benefit when their work is seen and recognized (teammates, managers, organization) but struggle to find and maintain this visibility

- can our participation encourage HELPING PROJECTS FIND MAINTAINERS (or GitHub sponsors/support)?
- encourage GitHub stars?
- each "entry" (lightning talk/listing) links to GitHub; we help maintainers in advance structure a "help wanted" or "how to support"... page? section? so that traffic they might get as a result of being featured can lead to visibility, encourage collaboration?
-
### Developers need to believe that their *individual* productivity will go beyond their teams: visibility/recognition

"Peak success is code written in a way that is composable and easy to digest for other developers, potentially has documentation around it" -- true success is not accomplished until the loop of *visibility* is completed

- want visibility and recognition for their good job done
- We tend to forget/lack awareness of the amount of work we have done, leading us to devalut/minimize our pprogress
- having concrete evidence of progress and accomplishment mitigates this, and increases sense of value and mastery over work
- it also increases empathy and self-compassion, boosts coping abilities
- relying on your manager to surface your work to the right people, at the right time, is variable (precarity of relying on individual advocacy): the *system* could instead provide this visibility/recognition
- Visibility was frequently defined as the skill of translating and
creating transparency around how engineering effort leads to impact,
Overall, being able to count on
visibility that went “beyond your software team” raised developer confidence and motivation,
and also brought information back to engineering teams about business impact, driving
improvements to overall software quality
- Increasing visibility may be a lever for big impact. Reminiscing about early career, one
manager in our qualitative study described the impact of “a really good boss” who involved
them in a tangible demo with real customers, remembering it as “quite empowering,
because you know the end user of this product.”