Organizing and co-hosting Dapr Day - Dapr's 5th anniversary
On October 16th 2024, the Dapr OSS project turned 5 years old! 🎉 To celebrate this milestone, I organized a virtual event called Dapr Day, together with the CNCF.
This post covers some of the larger aspects of organizing and co-hosting this virtual event, and includes a link to a recordings on YouTube.
Organizing
Events organized with the CNCF have several requirements, to ensure the events are fair and inclusive. More info about the various CNCF events and their requirements can be found here.
Organizing an event starts many months before the event itself. We first decided on the actual event date, and worked back the timeline and actions from there.
The first big thing that was required was establishing a program committee. This committee is responsible for selecting the talks and speakers for the event. The members of the program committee were: Mark Fussell (Diagrid), Cassie Coyle (Diagrid), Oliver Tomlinson (Dotmatics), and Paul Yuknewicz (Microsoft).
I setup the call for papers (CfP) using Sessionize, a platform that makes CfP management easy for both organizers and speakers. Once CfP was closed, the program committee first did an async review individually before we met together to discuss the session. This is always a tricky part because everyone has some favorites, and we have to make sure we end up with a good mix of topics and speakers.
We approached two keynote speakers ouside the CfP process: Mark Russinovich (CTO of Microsoft Azure) and Joe Beda (Kubernetes co-creator). Both were very enthusiastic about speaking at Dapr Day, and we were very happy to have them join.
After the final speaker selection was made, I sent out invites to the speakers with instructions on how to prepare for the event.
Co-hosting
For about a year now, I’ve been alternating the hosting of the Dapr Community Calls with Cecil Phillip, who is one of the Dapr Community Managers. Cecil is a great host, and has a lot of experience with live streaming, so I asked him to co-host Dapr Day with me. Together with Annu Singh, another Dapr community manager (mostly working behind the scenes) we brain-stormed how we can make event engaging and fun for the attendees. We took some successful ingredients from the Dapr Day that we organized in April 2024 and expanded on that.
Aside from some initial audio feedback loop issues, the co-hosting for the event went very well. I really enjoyed doing a Kahoot quiz where we asked the audience questions about the history of the Dapr project. The tricky thing with live streaming and interacting with the audience is the delay. We were using Restream to stream to the CNCF YouTube channel and the delay was around 25 seconds. I made sure the Kahoot answering time was long enough to compensate for this delay.
Thanks to all the speakers, the program committee, the CNCF, and the Dapr community for making this event a success! 🙏
