Latvian software craftsmanship community

Andrey Adamovich·

LatCraft is the community of awesome Latvian software craftsmen and craftswomen. We host events, where we invite amazing speakers from across the world.

Playing a bit the role of LatCraft's historian, I have collected some statistics and facts to show our achievements.

🔊 65 SPEAKERS from 🌍 11 COUNTRIES and 🏦 54 COMPANIES presented 79 TALKS and 3 WORKSHOPS and we had 2 PANEL DISCUSSIONS.

LatCraft is 3 YEARS old. We started in December 2014 and did not stop since then:

first event tweet

Audience

Our COMMUNITY SIZE can be estimated from 700+ members in Facebook, 1570+ unique e-mails collected from EventBrite, and 280+ Twitter followers.

Almost 3000 VOTES were collected through our voting devices.

voting devices

3400+ TICKETS were issued through EventBrite over the course of these 3 years.

eventbrite

All our events are free. Sometimes people register, but do not come. It's totally normal for free events. For the events, where we checked tickets, DROP OFF RATE (registered, but did not come) is from 36% to 50% (average 46%). By knowing our average drop off rate, we can plan the approximate space needed to host all the attendees who will actually come to the event.

There are some events that are very popular (e.g. Block Chain or Machine Learning). Those events get a lot of ticket registrations, but given the limits of the venue we have to put some people into the waiting list. For those events, we usually ask our audience through the social networks to cancel their tickets if they know they could not make it to free up spaces for those in the waiting list.

Since 2016 we started to use sli.do for collecting questions from the attendees. For the events, where we used sli.do and have check-in data, AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT in sli.do is over 37% on average, but is over 42% in several events.

slido

It's very insightful to read sli.do infographics after the event.

Content

Our MOST VIEWED SLIDE DECKS are from the "Made In Latvia" event in August, 2016. Overall, they got 32000+ views on SlideShare. Raimonds Simanovskis's "eazyBI - a Different Start-Up Story" is the most viewed slide deck ever with 13000+ VIEWS and two other talks getting over 9000 views each ("Finance meets technology: building a FinTech startup" and "Journey from Living Room to 1.5M Users Worldwide").

There are 11 other decks that received over 1000 views each. In general, Eduard Sizov's slide decks get a lot of views (12000+ for the "Beyond Software Craftsmanship" talk and 5000+ for the "Architecting well-structured Java applications" talk).

We have data about 2500+ SLIDES SHOWN to our audience, but most likely it is close to 3000. Slide decks have on AVERAGE 42 SLIDES, with longest deck having 127 slides and shortest only 3.

SpeakerDeck, where we shared our slides initially, is almost not getting any views. Same slide decks published on SlideShare get more views (usually the difference in views may be 2-3 times to hundreds of times bigger). Despite of all SlideShare deficiencies, it seems to be a better slide deck sharing service in terms of attracting viewers (or it is just different in the way they count the viewers 😀).

Our MOST VIEWED VIDEOS from LatCraft/DevTernity YouTube channel are:

In 2017, we decided to switch to Facebook and use it as our live video streaming platform. 2 videos ("High Level intro to Blockchain", "Blockchain Tech - The Journey") published on Facebook from the Blockchain event last year got over 600 views each.

Also, full videos of the "Machine learning and AI" and "Cloud Platform Panel" events got over 1000 views each.

Speakers

Our AVERAGE SPEAKER RATING is 85%. 39 speeches got rating below 90%, 20 below 80%, 14 below 70%, 6 below 60%, and only 1 below 50%.

The following picture shows the overall voting score for each of our events (pessimistic estimate gives +2 points for green vote, -1 for yellow and -2 for red; optimistic gives +2 for green, +1 for yellow and -2 for red; optimistic+ gives +2 for green, +1 for yellow and -1 for red):

pulse

There are 4 speeches that have got 100% GREEN votes:

Next 9 speakers that received over 96% include:

Conclusion

In the end, I would like to share a little time lapse video from one of our events: