Organizing a successful Tech event

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6 min read

awss1.png Event Summary

Deep learning on AWS was a collaborative event between AWS and Deeplearning.ai in Kenya which aimed at familiarizing students and beginners with AWS Cloud services with a special interest in developing best practices in deep learning and data engineering. The event was initiated, planned, and organized by deeplearning.ai ambassadors in Kenya; Nicholas Musau, Sylvia Chebet Kennedy Wangari and Lydia Gathoni.

The event focused on three topics

  1. Getting Started with AWS Cloud services
  2. Data Engineering on AWS
  3. Deep learning specialization

Planning activities

The planning of the event involved a series of meetings before the event day. The hosts managed to assign themselves various roles to ensure the event’s objectives and goals were met. Nicholas and Lydia coordinated the writing of relevant documents to speakers, contributed greatly to the drafting of the poster content, mobilizing the audience, and even moderating the event on 20th June. On the other side, Kennedy manned the zoom platform. Nicholas managed the YouTube platform while ensuring the communication of the speakers, and the audience ran seamlessly well. Eventually, Nicholas maintained close contact with speakers prior, during, and after the event offering relevant communication and updates of the event planning and proceedings while Lydia moderated the speakers. It was all good teamwork.

AWS Cloud services” which took around 30 minutes. The session was informative, engaging, and encouraging. Comments popping up in the YouTube channel showed great interest in the session and demand to understand the practical bit of using AWS Cloud Services. The second session “Data Engineering on AWS” which lasted for 30 minutes explored in details, data engineering practices on AWS Cloud and the various components of the AWS Platform. Ewere Diagboya the AWS Community Hero in Africa and the founder of nOps Consultancy Company gave within his session case studies of successful AI-based projects on AWS cloud.

The third speaker, Mo Rebaie; Data Scientist who specialized in developing deep learning algorithms for prototypes at the AI Anthropology Research Labs, explored in-depth the “Deep learning specialization” topic. He cited the best ways of developing industry-relevant machine learning models, building and deploying flexible deep learning models, and also shaping career paths in deep learning specialization. Comments popping in the YouTube showed interest in learning AWS Cloud services, and deep learning courses. However, some asked for free courses for both AWS cloud and deep learning.

Proceedings of the event

The webinar started at the scheduled time, with a greeting video from Dr. Andrew Ng the founder of deeplearning.ai and Jianjun Xu started the first session exploring more than 30 AWS Cloud services are available to customers. Unfortunately, there was an incident of Zoom-bombing that interfered with the live-stream in Zoom and YouTube. The organizing team noticed the incident but it was hard to identify the infiltrators. The team, through the platform administrator, had to restart the Zoom meeting and YouTube live-stream, which resulted in losing a great number of our audience following via YouTube. The rest of the session went on well, up to the end.

On the event day, it was all a success.

Results

The organizers’ expectations and goals were 75 percent met. The sign-ups were 245 in number, which happened within one week of the event. The statistics were below the team’s expectations to have more than 500 registrants. The results were attributed to the current Covid-19 pandemic where many students are quarantined at their homes, where internet connectivity is a challenge. The organizers did not expect a Zoom-bombing incident which highly affected the flow of the event and led to the drop in the audience number.

Recommendations and Conclusion

After the analysis of the event that affected Deep learners and AWS cloud students enthusiasts, the team suggested the use of a different platform to relay future online events. Regarding the comments gathered from the YouTube channel, the team wishes to request the sponsors of the event to offer coupon codes to the attendees wishing to dive into the cloud and deep learning specialization. Also, the organizers would structure better strategies to promote future events during the pandemic season. The new marketing strategies seek to promote the expected number of registrants and attendees. We (the organizing team) would request support from the sponsors to host the event on their blogs to expand the reach of the registrants.

Thanks to all our contributors in this event..