Sao Paulo 2018 in review

by Fernando Ike - 13 August, 2018

Introduction

This is a report with data stats and lessons learned about DevOpsDays Sao Paulo 2018, held on 06 and 07 of June at Hotel Century Flat.

Goal

Most events with DevOps subject in Brazil have more like Ops profile, others events that are trying to reach “DevOps public” add a track about that. But, often talks have subject around tools. We would like to discuss to invoke subjects beyond Infrastructure as Code and/or Continuous Delivery.

To leverage this goal, we approve talk proposal that didn’t present in others events with DevOps subject here. We think we did that because subjects were eclectic as you see:

Use case
Quality Assurance
Automation
Continuous Delivery
Gamification
Kanban
Technical Debt
Digital Transformation
Chaos Engineering
Software Defined Network
DataOps
Agile

These topics helped us to reach our goals: public age range is 32 years old, 240 attendees came from 48 cities and 9 states. It’s a good surprise because we thought that the most attendee would be from Sao Paulo state. This a good glue to organize DevOpsDays events in other cities of Brazil.

A crazy data collected is of 240 attendees, we found 170 different roles IT. CEOs, CTOs, developers, QAs, sysadmins and others professional job name showed us we need discuss more about DevOps into different levels in the organizations. There is effort to really understand what’s mean apply DevOps for companies.

Attendees

As we cited above, we had +- 240 attendees with 32 years old as age range, 9 states and + 40 cities.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have put effort to bring women as attendee. Just 12,5% was identified itself as woman. We thought if we had more women as speaker, automagically, the event also would increase women attendee. We were wrong about that and in the next we need to plan ways to increase women participation.

Tickets

Tickets sold out one week before the event. Here (Brazil), we learned some things that help other local DevOpsDays organization.

Tickets to public sector

Public sector only pays by payment commitment, so we had to partnership with a company that knows how to deal with the bureaucracy process of government purchase. We took a while before doing this, so we learned that it would be best to plan this right from the start.

Ticket system

We used Eventbrite as ticket system, it was good for first time to use them but we really think to use other system because they don’t have a feature to make issue invoice (we call nota fiscal) automatically, we needed a partner to do that. Other feature they don’t have is to generate certificate by system.

Marketing

So, we invest time and money for advertising (Twitter and Linkedin) help us to keep a good stream by day for sell tickets. We just follow main tips about post in these social medias, we really recommend expend a time to do that.

Women

It’s really important to have women in the event organization, this sound like obvious but it isn’t. If you wish to have good women participation your event, consider to bring women in the organization event since early steps. We had + 30% as women speakers because we have people (women) think how bring more women as speakers.

Volunteers

Volunteers were amazing, helps us a lot. We are really grateful:

Carol Valencia
Tancredo Luiz Ribeiro Inomata
Lisandra Rocha de Medeiros
Taiana Bárbara de Paula Nunes
Diego de Souza Santos
Camila Francisco dos Santos
Rafael Salem Gazze

Talks

Our Survey about talks show that speaker had average above 80% was good. /blog/2017-cuba/

Others lessons

Survey talks shortly end

So, this only work if you use a mobile app.

Coffee throughout event

People like coffee. :)

OpenSpace at the same time with talks

We had a fear about OpenSpace couldn’t work and we use a small room for it. Fortunately, we were wrong, OpenSpaces were great success but they competed with talks for attendees. Next event we push OpenSpace to main program.

Quantity is not equal to quality

We think it’s better attendees feel comfortable and they have a good experience in the event. Even though the event has less attendees or schedule a facility more bigger. Backdrop didn’t fit

We didn’t measure stage correctly and backdrop didn’t fit. We explained for sponsors and were really understood.

Videos in MPEG-2

We don’t wrote correctly what we want and our video provider delivered to us all talks in DVD discs.

Just a unique website

2018 we used two sites, we thought that if we have a site with .com.br could be better to people access it. Therefore, we used DevOpsDays site and our custom site but Google Analytics showed us it’s better to use a unique site (international site). It’s simply metric

https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2018-sao-paulo - 15,000 pages views

http://2018.devopsdays.sampa.br/ - 620 page views