Innaugural GDevCon N.A. Recap
It took a while, but I finally wanted to get around to writing a recap of GDevCon N.A. I was waiting until we got all our videos back and uploaded to our YouTube Channel. See below. If you missed anything, you’ll definitely want to check those out.
Presentation Videos
Stats
Just a few statistics for you:
- 14 presentations (including 1 that became a TED talk)
- 63 attendees
- 11 Bronze Sponsors
- 2 Gold Sponsors
- $18,500 in sponsorship money raised
- $23,000 in ticket sales
- raised ~$6K for downpayment for 2022
Not too bad for our first year. Especially in the middle of COVID
Links
Here are just some links that you might find interesting
My Perspective
I was just really glad that we were able to pull it off. It went much better than I expected. Our sponsors really helped out a lot with the finances. Ed did a great job with getting the sponsors and Bill did a great job with monitoring the finances. We had a lot of great presenters, who generated a lot of good discussions. Jeremy did a great job of scheduling presentations so they flowed well. There were no arguments or anything over masks. Everyone took that in stride. As far as the board members everyone stepped up and did their part. Jeff did a good job getting us some swag. We had a really good dinner and some good conversations there. All the attendees I talked to seemed to be having a good time. Everything just kind of came together in the end.
Improvements
The main improvements we are going to implement in 2022 are around presentations. In 2021 we just tried to squeeze way too many in. We didn’t allow enough time for questions. Between presentations, we had about 5-10 minutes and it wasn’t enough time for snack and bathroom breaks. More importantly, it made the conference feel like drinking from a firehose. There wasn’t any time to digest everything. One of the advantages of an in-person conference is that hallway discussions in between presentations and by compressing everything we killed that. Luckily we got plenty of that at dinner, but in 2022 look for a much more relaxed pace to give space for those impromptu discussions.
GDevCon N.A. 2022
Which brings us to GDevCon N.A. 2022. We’ve already got a date a venue and have started selling tickets. We are currently accepting sponsors and presentations. Check out our website for more info and to purchase tickets. We have an early bird discount, so be sure to take advantage of that.
Changes
We changed the date. We moved to the middle of summer – July 17-19th to avoid other conferences. We moved the location to the Buffalo Rose in Golden. The Hyatt Place in Boulder was a great host, but we’re hoping to grow this year and they didn’t really have the capacity we were looking for. Golden is very near Boulder. You’d still fly into Denver. It’s a much smaller town feel. It still has some nightlife. There are a few dive bars and food halls and a speakeasy. Everything is walking distance. Just like Boulder, there is plenty of outdoor stuff to do. We made the conference a 2.5-day conference to allow us to spread things out and allow for more conversation. Again check out our website for more information.
Thanks
Lastly I ‘d just like to say thanks to everyone who made this possible. I’d list individuals but I’m sure I’d forget someone so I’ll go with broad categories. The original GDevCon organizers deserve credit for coming up with the original idea and doing such a greatjob with it that they inspired us to repeat it over here. They were also very supportive of our efforts in a variety of ways. The GDevCon N.A. board members and everyone who joined our initial meetings and our slack group were instrumental in helping to organize everything behind the scenes and pull everything together. One of them even donated hosting for our website (I said I wouldn’t mention individual names, but you know who you are.) Our sponsors were very generous and helped us make ends meet financially. Our presenters did a great job sharing their knowledge with the community and creating a lot of great discussion. And lastly our attendees did a great job. They asked some great questions of the presenters. They also all did a great job with adhering to the mask mandate. Lastly our videographer did a really get job capturing all the presentations. Thank you all!
