I have been organizing open-source related meetups and conferences for more than a decade. The past two years have been exceptionally trying. Any guesses as to why that is? :)

In this session, I will share our experiences from the 6 online Ansible Contributor Summits that we have held through 2020-2021. While the virtual platform gave us more flexibility in many ways (such as having 3 events in a year instead of the usual 1), it definitely presented many new challenges as well. From pre-event marketing to technologies used during the summits, post-event surveys + feedback that feed into the next event, it's a continuous cycle of trials, errors, and improvements.

There is also a major shift towards using open source tools and workflows for the summits, at the request of some community memebers as well as the desire within our team. I'll share what fell short and what thrived, and how the changes impacted not just conference management for our team, but also how the Ansible community received these events. Because at the end of the day, these conferences are for the community contributors and participants!