Any tips or ideas for organizing an internal quality conference?

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We are currently organizing a mini internal test/quality conference.
Do you guys have any tips/ideas for what we can do at our conference or what we can talk about? How do we get people involved? And how to get people to attend?
Have you organized such a conference yourself? How did it go?

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This is awesome @demivm!!!

Here’s some things that I’ve done in the past for something similar.

  1. ADVERTISE! Make posters, get cool images on slack, talk about it in meetings… let people know what’s happening, when it is and that they’re invited!
  2. Think about your audience, is this for testers or the wider business? What will they want to know about and how do you make it interesting to them? Do you need to cover the basics or do some really deep dive stuff to be relevant?
  3. Socialise the learning track, let people know what’s going to be on the agenda and also WHY IT’S AWESOME AND YOU WANNA JOIN WOOOO!
  4. Make it hands on, people like getting together and doing things so make it exciting and fun (I’ve used building lego with uncertain requirements or testing a kid’s toy as fun workshops).
  5. Make it exciting, use a mascot and use memes and use things that’ll make people want to come! If it seems dull and corporate people might not wanna attend… also fire up the energy with a good host.
  6. HAVE SNACKS / DRINKS / PRIZES… get people into the session by dishing out prizes and rewards for sessions. Or use points (ahhhh remember the old TestBash X events peoples?) and a leaderboard of who’s winning! This means gamifying the workshops of course hehe.

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What you can talk about? :slight_smile:

Why don’t you host an Open Space “Unconference”?

I have a write up about the first Belgium Meetup I hosted with the open space format and it was quite a success. You can totally do this on an internal conference also.

=> First Belgian-Leuven MoT Meetup! 11 October - #4 by kristof

As Callum said: Soft drinks, Snacks are a must have! :slight_smile:
Workshops are quite popular and don’t mention the word “training” you could label it as “Teambuilding” otherwise some people might see it as a negative.

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Hey @demivm,

Great question and literally while writing this the thought that came to mind was that you reached out to the Testing Community, which in turn has folks who do public speaking on a variety of topics. A helpful way to think through this is to consider what is the valuable proposition for an attendee having attended. You may want to consider a few learning outcomes for the persons and working your way back. In doing that it helps for you to break down the approach, session management for the attendees, format of the delivery in person/ Team Activity/ collective watching of a session, the marketing needed like @cakehurstryan suggested.

You can also run a poll now to get feedback on what the attendees might be interested in to gain a sense of what topic(s) might be relevant for them in the Now and Future. Hope that helps, if anything else comes to mind I’ll try to reply.

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