Virtual FoxFest 2020

This is the Fox Show. Today is September 15th, 2020.

I'm your host, Andrew McNeil, and today we're talking with Rick Schumer, Doug Hennig, and Tamar Grainer about Virtual FoxFest,

the new conference coming up in October.

So, Virtual FoxFest 2020.

I kept on asking you guys when you were doing Southwest Fox, when is it going to go virtual or completely online?

I didn't intend it to happen this way.

Oh, so it's your fault.

So, we actually started talking about what to do for this year.

Pretty much as things started shutting down, we began the conversation and pretty quickly realized that planning an event for October,

actually November this year, just wasn't realistic and began exploring our options.

And so now the conference is being held over three days.

Right?

So.

Yeah.

Yeah, we decided that doing three days in a row would be a little bit of a stretch on people's ability for their attention spans to maintain the consistency that they're going to need it.

So, we broke it over three different days that are spread over three different weeks.

And from what I understand, the sessions are.

The sessions are not being repeated, but they are available for viewing afterwards.

Is that right?

Yeah, we're recording all the sessions.

And in fact, some of the sessions will be prerecorded and not be part of the live conference.

And they'll be publicly available after the conference.

You have to register for the conference to get the materials.

But the videos themselves will be available.

For the Fox Pro community.

Right.

And that will happen almost immediately after the sessions are over on the 27th.

Or is it going to be some time lag between cleaning up and what have you?

I think it'll be pretty quick right after.

It's really just a matter of downloading them from the platform and then uploading them to, we'll probably use YouTube.

So just, we're not going to do any process and we're not going to be editing or things like that.

We'll just, works and all.

Okay, off it goes.

Well, that's good.

So the session itself, the sessions itself, when did they run from?

Obviously they're October 15th, 21st and 27th.

Is it, what's the timeframe for people that want to be partaking in?

So we haven't set the exact timing, but the goal is that we will run from East Coast time, late morning till dinner time, which means that for folks on the West Coast,

it will be pretty much the workday or part of the workday, but it's still accessible for Europeans as well, at least some of it.

The goal was to find a timeframe that would facilitate the best attendance.

Right.

Absolutely.

So in that regard, obviously registration is now open.

This obviously gives an opportunity for getting more international input or involvement in the conversation.

conference. Are you seeing that in the pre-registration numbers?

Yeah, absolutely. Half the people who have registered, we're up to, I believe, 100 people

who have registered already. But half the people are new to a Geek Gatherings conference. And a lot

more people internationally this year have registered already compared to previous years.

Although we've had pretty good international representation at the conference over the years

at Southwest Fox. Yeah, I think we've got people from, I think, last time I counted was 13 different

countries. Sorry. I think we've got people from about 13 different countries here. Some of whom

we've never had people from before.

I think we've got people from the brain, for example, one of our speakers is from there, so.

Right. And I was going to say, this is true for speakers as well. We got session proposals from

people who'd never submitted before and from places where it would not have been realistic

for us to have them. Typically when we're choosing speakers, we really do have to pay attention to

where people are from because bringing speakers from out of the country is really expensive.

And so we have some people speaking,

this year, who probably wouldn't have submitted for Southwest Fox, but also we would have had to

make choices among a group of good sessions, good speakers, because of the cost of bringing them.

Right. So who are some of those people?

I noticed that because a couple of them, the names were familiar, and then a couple of them,

they are unfamiliar names for most people in the North American Foxborough community, I would say.

Right.

So, as Doug mentioned, we have a speaker from Bahrain, whose name is Ajit Abraham.

John Ryan, who lives in New Zealand, is going to speak, and he has attended Southwest Fox once,

but still, you know, it happened to work for him that year. He was in the States on business anyway.

And we have, I think, three European speakers this year, Christoph, as always. But let's,

you know, we have three other speakers, and the one that has a similar name,

and one of them is Robert Holst, who has attended once and had been a regular at the German Fox Pro

Conference, will be speaking. And Robert Holst, who's part of the Xsharp team and lives in the

Netherlands. I think that's all the international speakers, but five, typically we have one. So, five

is a lot.

attendees, especially as you were saying, 50% are coming in, even registered right now are coming

in from other areas. They at least know it's a little bit more of a non-North American bent on

a lot of the things on there. So that's kind of nice to see. So how are the day, Rick, you mentioned

earlier on a little bit about how the days are being chosen. I think it's the 21st, 15th, 20th,

it's all on Thursdays, correct? No, no. In fact, one of the things that we, they're six days apart.

We specifically did that so that it would not be all on one day of the week. Because if somebody

was always busy on, say, Thursday, then they wouldn't be able to attend to the live sessions.

They still could register and just watch the sessions later. But we decided we were going to

do a Thursday, a Wednesday, and a Tuesday. And by doing that, we hit different days a week,

hopefully.

That doesn't cause any scheduling problems. You can never satisfy 100% of the situations

and scenarios. But we tried to do with an intention of not at least butting up against

someone who has a hard thing going on a specific date. Yeah, right. I really did appreciate actually

looking at it, the fact that it is over the three days, and they are separated out because it does

work out really well, especially when, as we were originally planning this schedule,

this meeting to be scheduled on one day, and then something pops up,

and something pops up, it'll actually be quite nice to be able to attend and see these things take

place in real time. So in that regard, we were out, you were wondering what you were asking, or

sorry. Earlier on, you were not sure about which platform you were going to be working on. I've

done a couple of things previously in Zoom, which has obviously gotten all the big recap these days.

There's YouTube Live and so forth. But what is the platform that you've chosen to go with?

We're using Hopin and we did look at lots of different platforms, we did look at Zoom and

Google, Microsoft Teams and a number of other platforms. But Hopin seems to be the one that I

think works best for a virtual conference, as opposed to an individual meeting like this,

for example. Because with Hopin, you get a main stage kind of like you would have in say a

singletrack conference.

have breakout rooms they don't call them that but they could think they're called

sessions but essentially that's what they are is their breakout rooms and

those breakout rooms could be anything they can be a presentation they can be a

bunch of people chatting about a common topic they can be used for networking

you want to have virtual a virtual bar they can be used for doing demos because

you can control the number of people that come into the room the number of

people that are visible you know like with video like now and and you can do

screen shares it also has a virtual trade show so vendors can set up virtual

booths they can they can do demos they can show YouTube videos or do other

streaming video they can talk to talk to attendees they can show demos by a

screen share so it really works out nicely as a virtual conference as

opposed to just a single meeting like

there's even a feature to let pairs of people connect and talk through the

platform so you see somebody ask an interesting question in a session and oh

I really want to talk to that guy about what he's doing and there's a way to

make that connection have a conversation right through the platform right so

it even has from chats so you can have room based chats or a conference based

chat and there's also polls so we can ask questions of a you know hey you guys

wanna watch to create a new room or things like that

attendees can even create their own session rooms so that's something they

can say okay you know what I like to spend some time talking about wrestling

web connection and maybe get a bunch of people who have similar interests they

can create a new chat or an interview with themselves I like to call it stuff

create a room and throw out an invitation and whoever wants to can come into that room and they

can start chatting about it so how is this actually going to then work from a session

perspective are you are you monitoring the sessions that are going on because it sounds

to me like the sessions are basic as you were saying over the three days it's at one session

per time frame is that how are those being broken down yeah we'll be single track and the main stage

will be used for the scheduled sessions but then there'll be these other spaces where people can

visit the trade show or perhaps follow up from a previous session for a conversation or whatever it

is so at that point in time then i guess the session is being i guess a moderated one of you

is moderating that session to deal with any of the questions that may be coming in real time

i think that's one of the questions that people end up having whenever they're watching a

a virtual session

virtual conference perspective is uh how are the or even if you're just doing a regular larger

group meeting uh through one of these through one of the platforms is how is that process being

moderated we're going to have um the ability for people to post questions like you see in other

type platforms like zoom uh and then we'll have uh one of us or another speaker moderate those

questions and then periodically uh

interrupt the speaker if they're not um following it along themselves which is going to be very

challenging to do and then they'll just interrupt and other people be able to ask questions along the

way so it it won't be the same as an in-person um session where you're in front of a group of people

and you see people raise their hands and stuff so there'll be some of those challenges that we'll all

get used to as we're going through these but it's i think going to have the same effect where people

are able to interact uh with the with the speakers yeah one one sorry one difference between the main

stage and what they call sessions like i said would you think about that as a breakout room

is that in the on the main stage you don't see the attendees the only video is by the speaker

themselves whereas in the breakout rooms there it is very similar to zoom where you can see

if a person has their webcam turned on uh you can see them you can talk to them they

can do audio as well um i think this is going to be new to us like rick said but i think one of the

things we may find is that it'll work better for speakers to pause frequently and ask for questions

because i know when i'm doing a presentation i'm kind of focused on looking at my screen and i'm

maybe not looking in the chat window um so i may miss some questions that go by and that's what

rick alluded to is doing some moderating there but i think overall it might just work better if

we encourage speakers to stop every you know

every five minutes after every little topic ask for questions respond to them and then carry on

we'll see the other the other thing is that we're getting ready to have some practice sessions for

our speakers um setting up some test events so everybody can get familiar with the platform

before they're actually presenting because we've spent a little bit of time with it and we're you

know beginning to have a feel for it but it will obviously run more smoothly if everybody who's

using it

as from the speaker side gets a chance to practice absolutely when you're watching a lot of people

doing presentations and obviously visual video confer visual conferencing however whatever the

right term is that they like to refer to it as uh has been around for years but i also remember

going through individual learning stages of them and like when webex first started off they were

one of the first ones to have the hands up feature and even today you watch a lot of conferences and

if a kennel you see you sometimes watch them they use virtual and there's sometimes a channel

where they're profits ofowners now i've had Robert Brisson use a virtual phoneンcon memories meeting app to get Cityтрenters etc hearing aboutlements as well.

started in uh setting that up i imagine that entire hop in requires a fair bit of then i mean

it's not it's not just setting up a thing if you're going to have a virtual uh trade show

and the light going on there's going to be quite a bit of uh i'll be excited to see how that

walks through i guess from that perspective and the opening the opening of each day is that how

it will be you'll be handling it every morning you'll have one opening and then it'll just break

into however the sessions are i think so we're still

sure that's a great idea that's what we'll do thanks for the idea andrew

and it is kind of interesting because i as i said i was there's a lot of different ways people have

been doing conferences and so forth and certainly when you've got a chat that's going on the side

it ends up getting extremely distracting for for the speakers that are

speaking

speaking but and it's also even distracting for the users because the users end up trying if

they're paying attention to both sides then it'll be an interesting aspect of it so obviously this

past year has been a i don't think a pretty crappy year for a lot of things i'd be interested in

knowing how i i lucked out in the fact that my the contract and work that i'm currently doing

we were actually able to transition uh over a weekend to doing everything virtual and off of

off of the entire

corporate network without pretty much losing a beat but uh how rick you do an awful lot of work

with a variety of clients so how was your transition with covet uh we are pretty much

doing everything identical to what we did before i mean we have we have been in a

self-isolation mode for 16 years uh everyone works out of their homes

we do very little uh in person or in office work with our customers um but like all all businesses

we've been adjusting to a new normal as far as what business wants uh what business can afford

and how business is working through the economic changes our business has absolutely um been down

this year compared to last year uh it fluctuates and we have to keep an eye on things

quite closely on projects we've run through a couple of customers who have stopped work because

they quite frankly just wanted to hold on to cash in the new economy uh and then in the past two

weeks i've signed up four new customers so uh it's it's you know it's consulting life

it is consulting life and a lot of clients that we're seeing are doing far more virtual

virtual things and i i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to do that but i'm going to be able to do it

i think from a foxpro perspective that ends up becoming a little bit more challenging obviously

because certain applications aren't fox for applications typically aren't designed out of

the box at least to be um virtual network friendly they end up being more designed really around a

good citrix box or a virtual machine type of approach yeah yeah we we've run into a couple

of customers who uh ended up using uh some remote desktops into their um through vpn into their uh

desktops at their office and they're kind of like they're kind of like they're kind of like

office um and that's worked quite well for a couple of them and then the others have just uh

adjusted as needed i mean it's it's really uh it hasn't been a whole lot different as far as our

support goes we remote into everybody we from our perspective we just remote into

desktops and laptops and servers and do our job like the true tech people who end up looking at

it going i just like being in my own office my own room anyways

this is pretty much ideal exactly well we've actually yeah we've actually since i've been

i mean literally working out of our homes for 16 years uh for me and for most of my team as they've

come on board uh we've actually been guiding our customers through that scenario uh because i think

the hardest part for most businesses is just trusting that their people are going to do their

jobs from their home they they a lot of old school people don't like the

lack of control uh and not seeing the faces in the office to prove that they're doing their job

and that's been the biggest adjustment is just getting people to understand that people can

work anywhere at least office workers at least office work yeah tamar what about you how have

you been uh affected work-wise and uh right with all the changes are you pretty much working from

home again or as always i always have i've been working from my home for 32 years

and except for one client where i spent a day a week on site for the better part of the year

i've never really worked anywhere else so for my that part really hasn't changed for me

um the biggest adjustment is having my husband also working from home because since our kids

grew up and moved out i'm used to having the house to myself all day every day

so that's the biggest adjustment um work-wise i've been quite busy

in fact one of the projects rick mentioned is one that i didn't have time for and passed on to him

so um from from a work perspective it's just another year um

you haven't had to set up your office more with get making sure that you have

uh more cameras more more better sound better this because i i imagine that's been probably

one of the largest changes for a lot of people where they had their home computer they were able

to work on their home computer and work in the office for a lot of time and that's been kind of

the biggest change for people moving from the office to working from home so what's the biggest

computer and what have you and sure they may have a screen every now and then or this they've had

to really make it more of an investment in how they communicate um i don't end up having that

many work-related zoom meetings i have one client where we've been using zoom for three and a half

years but never with cameras because it's about looking at code and pretty much zoom has been

for volunteer work and my personal life oddly enough so i do i on my on my agenda is figuring

out where i'm going to situate for giving my session for this conference because as you can

see though your listeners won't be able to the spot i mean isn't very well lit and i haven't

figured out where i'm going to configure um for that stand up and on the main

stage for them to have a big stage for you to be able to pretend you're standing on

in the middle of the entry now doug you're probably unique in this regard because you're

you're working with product and so i imagine most of your support aspect has always been

doing it remotely and what have you so what have the what is the past year really how has it really

impacted your end um not much for me personally because i like uh tomorrow rick i've been working

at home uh since we moved eight years ago i did work in our office um in regina

but since i moved to winnipeg i've been working at my home really the only adjustment that we had

to make was um our receptionist and sort of office manager um she started working from home so we had

to make sure that she had a machine set up um i was we were at um just as the pandemic started to

hit uh we were all in toledo for foxconn and i was complaining to rick there about how much time i'd

spent over the previous six months um completely changing our infrastructure we went from having a

physical server to a server in the cloud we changed we moved a bunch of stuff over to github

and just you know had changed our email system our website everything was changed and i was

complaining all the time i was spending this i'm not complaining anymore because all the stuff that

i did made us perfectly positioned for for doing everything remotely so you know there was just

one weekend of getting our um getting our office manager set up at her house and that

all the other guys were were working from home anyway so not much not much new for us see that

sounds like a breakout session in and of itself well even though a lot of people have gone through

it they may still be going through their own learning curves and uh biting it on that point yeah

so i'm just going to go through a couple of the things on here so we've not talked about how the

aspect is going to work um when we briefly mentioned about the car about the network

working aspect are there certain types of things that you have obviously you're still in process

of planning things out but are there any surprises that or interesting things or new things that you

have thought of for the conference as it comes through unique things like i'm going to say i

refer to as i think we've really put our energy mostly into just figuring out how to make this

work because while there are while there are

a lot of pieces of it that are the same as what we've always done there's so much that's new it's

almost like running a new conference so we have not just like it is i was going to say it is it

is definitely like running a new conference it's completely virtual the one thing that we've done

normally you come to our conference and we give you a t-shirt and we're happy to sell you other

gear so we're not gonna have t-shirts printed and mail them to all our attendees that's just not

feasible but we have opened up a store an online store where people can order their own gear

and the url is and the url is

it's just click on my website just click on there's a link it takes you right to it

right yeah it's it's linked from our site that's true it's it's too long to give out directly

but it's on our website it's always easier to have the link and just put it right there

right up on there so people can see it from that perspective okay great is there anything

else you guys want to hit on with when i do some editing out or this kind of thing that you wanted

to discuss regarding the virtual fox fest i mean obviously it's a big change for people that are

coming through there aren't really too many deadlines or are there deadlines that people

need to be aware i mean the cost is an ideal cost for people to attend a virtual conference

we should mention yes that the the conference is only 49

months so if you've always wanted to come to southwest fox but the cost has been a barrier

this is your chance to come to a fox conference as cheap as it's ever going to be

while there's no deadlines uh i mean obviously you'll want to sign up before the conference

starts uh there are things that we can do in advance knowing if we have more people or less

people

uh

we have a we have a general idea or a general guess of how many people we think might register

for the conference but signing up sooner than later does help us manage certain things

uh from a behind the scenes perspective but not uh any urgency like we have in past years where

we physically have to do a lot of stuff uh or have a lot of stuff ordered in advance and stuff

like that so yeah you can register up to the last day of the conference for uh 49 bucks and and

uh get all the information you need and then you can sign up for the conference and then you can

get all the materials and watch all the sessions just like everyone else can absolutely okay well

that's great yeah you don't want to have the situation that we're having a couple of the

schools end up having where they've all of a sudden discovered that they've got 7 000 students

that have to do deal with things online and they just weren't thinking that they had to prepare for

that many right a lot of the classes and that students and schools and that kind of thing that

are facing it okay well great virtual fox fest 2020 uh october 15th 21st and 27th

uh we'll have the uh website uh listed in the in the show notes as well as a couple of different

places um and any places where they can get other information out of just directly on the website

correct yep virtualfoxfest.com okay great tamar and doug for meeting with me and telling us about

this great new conference you can find out more information as rick said earlier on at

www.virtualfoxfest.com

hope to see you online

you

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