Where the idea came from

A virtual pass gets you the sessions. It does not get you the hallway, the person in the next seat, or anyone to turn to when a talk lands. We kept coming back to that gap. What if the people watching from Austin watched in the same room?

A pop-up for one conference

The Grace Hopper Conference sells a virtual pass for people who cannot be in Anaheim. We started calling our version a pop-up vGHC: a local room for people who already hold that pass.

Why a silent disco

At a silent disco everyone wears headphones. Each person picks a channel, and the dance floor is still shared. That is the whole design. Everyone here signs in to their own pass on their own laptop and listens through their own headphones. The room exists for everything around the sessions: the welcome, lunch, a block of our own, and the conversation at the end of the day.

We are not the first to gather around a big conference

Communities have done versions of this for years. Developer groups run I/O Extended meetups and watch parties around Google’s developer conference. TED licenses TEDxLive events, where a local audience watches the TED conference together. We borrowed the instinct and changed the mechanics to fit a conference where each attendee holds their own pass.

Reading the rules first

Before going further we read the conference’s attendee terms and its recording policy, and designed around them. No shared stream. No recording. No rebroadcast. One person, one pass, one screen.

Small on purpose

The first sketch was bigger: partner organizations, sponsors, several days. We cut it back to one day, one room and two organizers. Year one is about finding out what works. If it ends up being the two of us and a handful of people, that still tells us what we need to know.

Fifty-two sessions, four tracks

In July we went through the conference’s virtual catalog: 46 sessions offered virtually, plus 6 plenary and mainstage sessions broadcast to virtual attendees. Nobody should start the day scrolling a catalog, so we sorted them into four tracks by career stage and checked that no track asks you to be in two sessions at once. Then we looked for the windows when the tracks go quiet. On Wednesday the best one is early afternoon, and it became the community block.

Finding a room

We looked at library branches, recreation centers and a coworking space. A public library room fit the idea best. It is free, it is quiet, and anyone can walk in.

Wednesday, October 28

We picked one day and committed to it. If it works, there is a whole week to grow into.