Last Saturday Mike and I made it across to the first MeasureCamp Auckland. We’ve sponsored all the previous events in Sydney and Melbourne so we were thrilled to help out the Auckland team, who did a fantastic job with a really good venue, excellent food and a really diverse crowd keen to get into it.
The board filled up very quickly. Clearly lots of people knew the drill and had prepared talks and sessions. I had some difficult decisions to make when sessions clashed but I didn’t go to a dud session all day!
At previous MeasureCamps a consistent problem has been access to the physical board. The board needs to be reachable for people to put up their talks, but that also means the people crowding around deciding on their sessions block the view of those behind them. It’s also difficult for people with visual impairments to read.
Mike has been working on a digital board. Initially as a fork of Vitaliy Matiyash’s code but eventually rebuilding it in Vue.js. The back-end is a Google Spreadsheet, allowing quite a bit of flexibility while keeping the board in sync with the physical board.
Late the Friday night before MeasureCamp Auckland, Mike and I sat up instrumenting and improving the user interface. We were able to build a quick real-time dashboard in Kibana using the Snowplow instrumentation. For future MeasureCamps this should provide some helpful feedback on the popularity of sessions, allowing organisers to shift things around to ensure the most popular sessions are in the biggest rooms.
We have some other plans around automatically tracking the cards as they move around using a camera and some kind of unique marking on each card. Perhaps we could have microcontroller-drive screens at each room showing what’s on and up next in each location. Lots of ideas!
The code will be going up on Github shortly.
Johann did a really interesting talk about tracking television (and radio) impacts, and the limitations of the technique. This is something I’ve always wanted to play around with, tying a detailed as-run log of TV spots in different regions into an increase in visits to your site.
Food and drink at the event were spectacular. Organisers made heroic efforts to accomodate the incredible mosaic of food requirements. Free coffee in the morning was great too!
Finally we ended up at the afterparty, a bar that included a couple of bowling alleys. Loads of fun, loads of pizza and a seemingly endless bar tab. Great venue for it!
Slides from talks
Here’s the slides for my talks. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about anything.
Digital Advertising: How does it work?
My always-popular session going into the nuts and bolts of display advertising, how it works and why. The last slide has some handy links to learn more.
Snowplow Analytics: Introduction and demo
A quick introduction to how Snowplow Analytics works and why you might want to use it. There was some great discussion in this session.
