The tweet that started it all...
The original landing page for the conference was just a Mailchimp website that had a signup form so I could capture interest. I put the vision out there and asked people to sign up. 
We hosted the site on Mailchimp for a Week before switching over to our current platform. I forgot (didn't know I needed) to turn on tracking for the site on day one so those numbers are lost. In a week over 3200 visitors and 328 signups on the site all organic
I created segments off the list based on who signed up to speak, who signed up to attend, and who signed up to volunteer. We had to manually import the volunteers into teams (product idea, mass import for Teams from we had to add each user 1 by 1) this was tedious but key.
Every day we exported the volunteers and added them to the team. One at a time...so sorry @tess_distefano and that formed the core team. I think we had around 84 volunteers through the form plus some internal volunteers from Microsoft. There are 106 people in the team at present
Of course I expected attrition so I tried to gather as many volunteers as possible knowing that only a certain number would actually be involved. Again @tess_distefano stepped up and did a tally of who was active beyond just joining the team. She came back with 25 active members.
A lot of thanks to @havanatweets for giving us a logo and June because...yikes...
I'm a huge proponent of #LeanStartup and that was the approach we used here. There is a big vision that I want to realize of creating a platform to introduce young Black students to tech careers. The conference would be the MVP of that platform. Bringing people around the vision.
Before we could build the conference, the landing page served as Customer Discovery and Validation. The conference would be free so we didn't need to ask if people would pay, just if they would attend if we did it, and if anyone would help us do it.
You saw the numbers from the first week. It told us in no uncertain terms "If you build it, they will come" And we scrambled to build it. We had a number of secret weapons that gave us an unfair advantage. But even with those aces up our sleeve, getting this done wasn't guarantee
Weapon one: Like I said, Microsoft gave me the platform to do this. My organization is CSE (Commercial Software Engineering) it is a conglomeration of several former orgs. One of them being DPE (Developer Platform Evangelization). Once I tell you about DPE and CSE you'll see.
CSE works with Microsoft's customers to help them leverage Azure in their technology solutions. We provide hands on guidance to our customers so they can hit the ground running. If you've heard of a Sales Engineer, that's my job in a nutshell. (With a lot of secret sauce).
DPE which is folded into CSE now was focused on Developers, Developers, Developers it was basically the community outreach arm of Microsoft. Building and hosting community events was DPE's bread and butter. And many of my colleagues in CSE were former DPE. You see where I'm going
There were a lot of people who heard my call to action who were EXPERIENCED event organizers @joshholmes pinged me right away. I volunteered at Seattle Give Camp which was hosted on Microsoft's campus but had very few Microsoft volunteers show up. But we knew each other before
There were some others with event experience like the illustrious @shanselman who offered to help but also said "hey let me get you in touch with" and the list ended up being like 20 people. All of whom had impressive credentials in event planning. All of this was great but...
We still had a HUGE problem...we needed a platform to host the conference on. Enter Henk Boelman who just happened to have helped develop a virtual conference platform thursday.cloud . He showed the platform and I knew our biggest technical challenge was solved.
That was when I tweeted: "We have the how" less than 12 hours after I tweeted the first request for help. After that it was a race to get more exposure. Find more speakers. Build a better conference. We were running at breakneck pace I activated Agile mode
If there's anything I know is Agile...nay Lean project management. If you want proof that I know what I'm doing in that arena I present to you Exhibit A : juneteenthconf.com
I knew that trying to group everything into one huge umbrella project would be a problem. So we broke the project into committees. One of the pillars of agile project management is self-forming teams. So I allowed the team to choose which area they worked on.
We used Teams for everything...it's an incredible product and I HATE most collaboration tools. We made a channel for each committee. I didn't want to jump the gun and start running without getting set. So we set a kickoff meeting for Friday the 5th and gathered tasks in Planner
I made a github project for organizing things originally but not everyone on the team were technical so the Planner tab in teams was the best option non-technical tasks and we saved github for the technical planning. By the time kickoff came around we had a healthy backlog
I gave my "Captain America" pep talk to kick off our meeting, then we looked at the work ahead of us and broke it down. We scheduled full project syncs MWF. Told the teams to pick a lead to report all up and asked @tess_distefano to help keep me focused
Side note, THIS is how you do team fit. Pair a scatterbrain like me with someone who can make order from chaos like @tess_distefano (I keep mentioning her but there are a lot of other players who made things work). I can leverage my best assets in rapid fire brainstorming and she
made sense out of all of it. In the committees a number of Black Women like @chixcancode , Valerie Sharp, and Melody Miller stepped forward to help lead various committees or put their heads down and just put in some amazing work. I wanted to empower the team to make decisions
They were a bit skeptical at first but as I kept reinforcing that I need their help and I trust them to put their best effort forward, they took more latitude with their work. Case in point I didn't have the idea to create speaker banners for everyone presenting. The SM team did.
Our only big obstacle was getting speakers...because a conference with out speakers is just a bunch of people staring at a screen. I can't remember who but someone introduced me to @DThompsonDev and he was gung ho about helping however he could. Our theme was #EmpoweredByTech
I knew we needed him to open with his story. I had no idea it would be so powerful! He left it all on the stage. (As did every speaker by the way). But I also wanted to highlight people in the #100DaysOfCode community so he did the #empoweredByTech interviews.
We originally wanted to sprinkle them through out the conference but the system didn't support segments with less than 15 minutes so we put them in their own session. That played across both tracks. Anyway I'll follow up with more about pulling off the grand heist later.
Spoiler alert. I'm not participating in the myth of innovation. This was not an overnight success. It wasn't even a two week success. This platform has been stewing in the back burner of my mind for over 20 years. I have been planning and preparing for this moment all this time.
Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. I've been building my network for years. Getting involved in the tech community. Putting my name out whenever I could. When this opportunity came, I was ready I just had to execute a plan that had been forming my entire adult life.
