DevCon 2020 by the numbers!
DevCon 2020 is in the books, and what an amazing conference it was. This blog will start a weekly series in which everything Thursday, we will talk about DevCon from a content perspective. To begin this series, I want to set some context about the scope of this conference, so you, the reader, will have a baseline to base your opinions from.
So let’s start with some basic figures:
- Client Registrations: 3,113
- Institutions: 1,276
- Countries: 54
- Badges: 2,348
- 358 Unique attendees to live sessions
- 2,352 Attendees to live sessions total
- 121,842 Collab session minutes
- Blackboarders: 300
If we really look at this, we can come up with some interesting insights.
If we base our calculations on unique attendees to live sessions, we can see that the average attendee spent almost 6 hours actively engaged in sessions. We had 71 hours worth of sessions spread out over three separate time zones – Monday - Friday 8am-10am EDT, Monday - Friday 1pm-3pm EDT and on five days, 3pm to 4pm, and Monday-Thursday 8pm-10pm EDT – so the average attendee joining 6 sessions is pretty amazing.
We also issued 6.6 badges per active attendee programmatically through Badgr. These badges included attending at least 75% of a collab session associated with a session, pathways, which awarded badges based on predetermined groups of session badges, interaction with Ally, and earning points and promotions in the leaderboard.
Speaking of insights, let’s take a look at a few that show how users interacted with the content provided:
Numbers and charts are cool, but what really matters from a DevCon perspective, is the experience of the attendees. Here are a few quotes that I think sum up the DevCon 2020 experience more that any statistic or chart can:
“SUPER big high-five / cheers / shout-out and ALL the other superlatives out to @Scott Hurrey and all that helped make this 2020 DevCon !!!! have greatly enjoyed it in this time of Social Distancing”
- Kevin Squire, PA Virtual Charter School
“Thanks @shurrey Scott for an awesome experience.. and thank you to all the presenters as well as participants. Look forward to continue networking and finding better solutions for students and faculty.”
- Arokia Raj, INTI International Universities and Colleges, Malaysia
“A big thank you to @shurrey and colleagues from @Blackboard for making the 2020 #DevCon a really special online experience. Spreading the event out over a fortnight gave participants a chance to practice and play, not just listen. Fun in dark times.”
- Malcolm Murray, Durham
To summarize, DevCon 2020 was a unique experience, and one that gave me a little bit of normalcy. Of course I would rather see everyone in person, but since I can’t, I was extremely happy we could have a virtual get-together.
Happy Coding! -scott