EVMan: event management tool for devrel teams

Transcript

Marek Jelen: So hello. Welcome. I I would like to thank all the people who actually spoke before me because it was awesome so far. So I will try to keep you interested for some more time. My name is Marik.

I work at Red Hat in the OpenShift evangelist team or developer advocate team. And we created a tool that helps us. So I would like to present it today and see what you think about it. Like, you can then talk to me about it because Matthew said there will be no QA sessions. So we cannot have QA.

So we can talk after the presentation. So the problem. As the team grows, our team has grown significantly. The data grows. So there is events, there is dates, there is a lot of information that you need to track.

It's being difficult to track who is where, who is coming, who has free time to do something, who can be available for some other events. As the number of the events increases, the logistics gets more difficult. Who, how to fly there, how to send flag, how to do sponsorships, etcetera. And doing all these things over the email doesn't work very well. So we used Google Spreadsheets for some time.

But as most people who I spoke today, they said like spreadsheets don't scale and they don't really work. Or Wiki, it it could work. But also it's not the like it's a cool idea how to do it. So we came with some solution. So let's put a tool that will allow us to track all this information.

And as the joke goes, now you have two tools. So but not really. The whole team actually managed to get there. We use it for everything. So all our events, all our traveling, everything is tracked using that.

That's two. You can see a small screenshot, which is a timeline that you get, and it shows what's coming for you, what's what's on your next engagements. So there has been some evolution. I joined the team in 2012. In 2013, we started with our first version, which was written in Ruby because I'm a Ruby engineer in my background.

So I started myself. Then some of the colleagues wanted to join and help me to build the tool. So we decided, hey, okay. You are the only one who knows Ruby in our team. So let's do some other language.

So we settled on PHP because it was easier than Java for web application development, and most people knew it. Still, I was the only one who was developing the application. Now in PHP, which I don't like, and I like Ruby. So we decided, Okay, so people are not satisfied with writing it in PHP. Let's try to do it in Java.

And we spent like three months discussing diagrams and stuff. And then I said, hey, no way. I'm not going this way. So I started I rewrote the whole thing in Ruby again. So I'm still the only developer.

We just had several iterations on that way. But it didn't work. So it was internal tool. And today, 2016, we are thinking to open source it. Ruby, yeah.

Ruby on Rails. So what it does, some basic features. It tracks your events. So it's all these things that you go to. It tracks your talks and CFPs.

So it shows you where your CFP dates, your deadlines. It shows what talk has been CFP'd for some event, if it was accepted or rejected. You get statistics on the talks and on the events. It helps you to manage your summaries and pictures. Some events ask you for public URLs.

Most people send Twitter. So we also have public URLs for your pictures. So you can use that tool to share your public pictures. There is a simple calendar inside the tool, like web based. And also, we have iCal export, so you can import everything into Google Calendar or iCal on your Mac or something.

We have simple warehousing systems. So for Slack, you enter what are your counts of e items, what are the prices, and then you can assign Slack for specific events. You can track cost, travel, sponsorships, and the swag that you sent for the event. Helps you to manage your team in a way like this is a profile, this is the people who are there. Statistics, who traveled how many times, who had most accepted talks, what are your most important regions, etcetera.

And of course, we have Slack integration. So when something changes, somebody is mentioned, you get a notification on Slack that you should look somewhere. We have some plans for the future. For the event management, like right now, I will show you how it works. But the flow is very simple.

So we're thinking to make a more complex way not complex, but more powerful way how to do the flow. We would like to build something for collecting feedback and statistics on events. So that's one of the biggest topics today, how to measure events. So it's very difficult. Event series should be something that will help you to track events that are in a series, like DevOps.

It's every year in different countries. So it should be a series of events that are linked together. And a better dashboard. For team management, to have a scoreboard, which is useful for our team maybe it could be useful for other teams as well. If you write the blocks, go to events, you get score.

And for every month, need or some period of time, you need to collect several points. And that gives you how much you have been active or not. Otherwise, you end up searching a new job. I don't think so. It never has any problem.

It helps you to see how much you earned that month. I don't know. We haven't used it yet. Like there is idea that we could use it, but we will see. And then with the permission system comes with the event flow management.

So if you have a flow of events, like you can CFP for this event already or not this event has to be approved, then you need a permission to allow only specific people to do it. And then it's something that I call moonshots, something that I would like to have, but I already know that I will probably not have the time and resources to do it. So do something like enhanced travel system. So if you have an event, it will see what's the closest airport, and it will show you how much you have to travel before, and it's something like that, which could be awesome, but it's super difficult. Personal social media analytics so if I get 20 or 50 new followers on an event, so I can see what was my talk at that event, and what was interesting or not.

Mobile applications. Right now, the application is responsible, you can use it on a mobile phone. But we don't have a native application for phones. And event organization tooling, which is bad wording. But essentially, we are starting also organize some events.

So have some basic tools for organizing events. But there is a lot of tools who help you organize events. Like there's many tools that allow that. But we didn't find any tool that would allow management of teams who travel for events. So that's why we built it.

Then if you would decide to try it, use it, we are always interested in feedback. So you can always tell us like, hey, this is a request for enhancement. It would be cool if you have this in the tool because I would like to use it. So it's open source project, or it will be open source. It's not yet there, but the repo is registered.

I am hosting it on GitLab, not on GitHub. So be sure that you type the correct yeah, sorry. Sorry. We are going to release it on Apache two iSent. And we are very interested in contributions, requests, bug reports, etcetera.

We are also hosting it as a service. So if you'd like to just try it or see how it works, it's on fmand.io. Right now, it's best effort. So I run it myself on GCE. So it's not my job to run it.

It's just something I do. So it's really, really best effort. But our team uses it. So it's important for me to keep it running. So that can give you some idea how much I care about it.

But we have hourly backups of all the data with one week retention, and all the files are endless free. So there should be no misses of the data. Okay. So let's go for a small demo. So this is the report that will be eventually filled in.

And this is the tool. I should make it a bit bigger, right? It's almost too responsive. So this is a dashboard. That's what happens when you log in.

You will see a timeline. So in December, I have DevRelcon, and I need to see FP for Voxdays in Vienna. In January, I have DevCon in Brno. And there is a conference in March that I am assigned as an attendee, so I will be probably going there, but it's not yet approved or committed or anything like that. I will show you what that means.

So based the timeline with the colors, and you can see what's happening what's coming for you in the future. If you go to events, you will see that over here, you would have all the continents and top next five conferences per continent. In middle, you have CFP deadlines. So the next deadline would be Vogue's Days in Vienna. That's December 15.

Track events are events that are not yet committed. It depends on the team how it defines committed. For us, committed means this is something we sponsored, so we are going, or we have a talk accepted, so we are going, right? So this is only tracked because there is nothing fixed yet. And committed events is the event that we are really going.

So I am at DevRelConf, and I am going to to DevConf. That's for sure. When I open the event, I see all this information that I need for the event. So there is overview. This is the basic page.

This is all the attendees who are going there, approved or committed. Approved means that it was before used by our team that our manager was approving the events. It doesn't happen that much nowadays. Home opens the website, the date. It's a conference.

It could be user group or something else. It's the address. When I click the address, I will get a map so I know where it is. I can zoom in, etcetera. So this is some notes, everybody can add note that somewhere over there.

I can add a new talk, whatever. I have talk over here. So my talk is AVMAN, Event Manager, Abstract is Introduce AVMAN. It was accepted for one show, which is DebraCon right now. So if I go back to this page, I can add more attendees, but I'm only one in the system right now because it's a demo that I just filled in for this event.

There is technical talk. So what will it be? There's only one talk like that. If you edit the event, you can fill in different stuff. So the cities are populated in database.

I get the information from geo names. So if you want to link it to some geo information, do something like Prague. It will no. Yeah. It will give you all the cities it's all the cities in the world that have population over 10,000 people.

So in those, it searches through these cities. You get the dates of the conference. You have CFP deadline, CF bureau, sponsorship rules, etcetera. In expenses, you track what you spend. So I spent EUR 150,000,000 on sponsorship, not really.

And I spent EUR 200,000,000 on travel. So I have two expenses, $200,000,003.50 together. And then I have swag, so I can have I can add new things. So for DevRelCon, I have a book that has something. I can add 10 more books that I sent here.

What's that? Yeah. So I already have the books there. So I can look at it a second time. So I sent two forty books for this event.

So altogether, my cost would be $710 for the event. Then you have a calendar. As well, it tracks your attachments. That's something like sponsorship will be flat for it. It's there, like a PDF that's uploaded.

Calendar, talks, I saw that. You saw that. So the warehouse, I have one for my swag. I have their book. The book had only one batch that was added on the December 6, and there is the price was $150 for the book.

I had altogether, how many books? Three sixty six, and I still have 126 remaining in my stash because I sent something here. And then you have a profile. That's where you track the information of the people. So I'm using Gravatar, so there's nothing there.

And then you can export your icon. So this is something that you can import into the other tools that you already use for calendaring. And that's pretty much it. So this is what we are using. And we would like to open source it.

So if you would like to use it as a service, if you want to try it, you can go to fmenio. You can sign up. It's just all out that authorizes you against GitHub, GitLab, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Yeah. So these services are being used for authentication.

And you can just try it with your team. You can create as many teams as you want. Just there is a picture of team on the top. You can create a new team. And then, oh, where is my team?

Okay. It would it should open. I think it's scaled right now, so it didn't show correctly. And that's it. So the repo, as I said, is right now pretty empty.

So is there anyone who would like to try it? Okay. There we go. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. There is 34 megabytes SQL that has all the geoinformation that you need to import. So that's why it takes so long to upload. It's the one big file. But we use the same file for four years, and we didn't have any problem with the geoinformation yet.

So it doesn't have to be updated. It's just there so people can import it. Come on. Don't break up on me, or I will have to move to GitHub. Yeah.

There we go. So refresh. It would be faster again. It could be. Yeah.

I I definitely agree that GitHub's Is around there. Quality of service is a bit higher than GitLab's. But I like to support smaller guys also because you guys are too big and Like Red Hat. Like Red Hat. Yes.

Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. I used to Gitlab.

No. Sorry? Wait. You're paying for Gitlab? No.

So how are supporting them? By the awareness. The awareness. By the awareness. I will probably set up a mirror because they allow mirroring to GitHub.

So I will probably create a GitHub account as well and mirror the code there. But our team is using GitLab, so it's for me, it's natural to use to host it here. And you are good at it. They do have amazing socks. Really great socks.

Yeah. They do. So that was the demo and that's it. So if you have any questions, anything, you can mail me at m gellanradhat dot com. You can go to fmanio, which is the hosted service.

You can go to gitlab.com fmanfman. That's the source code. We I created also a Twitter account, so fmanhq. We are on Twitter, and this is my Twitter as well. So you can follow us both.

So thank you very much. I hope I managed to get into the time. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach to me. I will be here till the evening.