We finally managed to organize the SymfonyLive Paris 2020 conference last week on September 23-24, initially scheduled at the end of March 2020. It was a great pleasure to meet the French Symfony community in this particular time!
We were supposed to organize the SymfonyLive Paris 2020 on March 26-27 but the global lockdown happened. With sadness, we had no other choice but to postpone the Parisian SymfonyLive conference to a later date. At first, we thought we could organize it in May or June, but as the global Covid-19 situation was still spreading all around the world, we decided to organize it late September. Month after month, the situation was still quite uncertain. The French Government finally agreed on having events back from the end of August so we were super happy with this decision.
On our side, we took all the sanitary rules to be able to safely organize the conference knowingly the current sanitary context. Here is a list of the most important sanitary rules we've taken for the SymfonyLive Paris 2020 conference:
- We’ve limited the event to 500 attendees, to only have one attendee every other seat, meaning that we were actually sold out from March. As this decision was taken in August, the sold out announce was made from then.
- We’ve asked people to wear a mask at all time, except at break and lunch times when they were seated to eat.
- For each break, the food was delivered in a package either a small packet with some cakes or in a lunch box. It was thus easy to take the food away and to eat seated in the conference room.
- Social distance was fully respected. We asked attendees to leave the conference room at breaks according to a specific protocol. Depending on where you were seated, you had to follow a special way to get your food and beverage. Several areas were established to pick up your food and beverage. Then people were able to gather in the exposition area to meet the sponsors, but still while wearing a mask and without creating groups of people.
- Hand sanitizers were available everywhere: at the entrance, on booths, at doors and even offered by our Diamond Sponsor SensioLabs.
- Badges were sent by PDF and attendees were scanned at the entrance, they were no more touches to get your conference badge. It was super easy to check-in!
- For Q&A at the end of talks, attendees were able to ask questions, **we handled the microphone so they didn’t have to touch it*, there was also a cover on top of it.
- Windows were open all time, except when it was raining.
- Cloakroom was only open for luggage, no clothes were taken.
Here is a sneak-peak of what we implemented during the conference to run it smoothly at no risks. This would not have been possible without all our attendees obedience. We’d like to particularly thank our conference attendees for participating in this special edition of the conference! Thank you for being so compliant with our sanitary rules and for your kindness. It was a great pleasure to meet you there!
A conference needs speakers! We’d like to thank all our wonderful speakers who came to share their Symfony knowledge and experience. Thank you to (in order of conference schedule): Fabien Potencier, Hubert Lenoir, Jérémy Derussé, Alexandre Salomé, Valentine Boineau, Timothée Barray, Grégoire Pineau, Nicolas Grekas, Danielle Kayumbi Bonkoto, Samuel Roze, Bastien Jaillot, Titouan Galopin, Stefan Richter and Kévin Dunglas.
Thank you also to our fantastic sponsors for their support! We could not organize a conference without their support, so a really big thank you to our:
- Diamond sponsor: SensioLabs
- Gold sponsors: Blackfire.io, Les-Tilleuls.coop, SymfonyCloud, SymfonyInsight and Webnet
- Silver sponsors: 24S, Hiway and Kaliop
- Bronze sponsors: 2le and Izi Solutions
All talks were recorded. Each conference attendee will receive an email to access the talks replay of the conference on SymfonyCasts as soon as possible. If you're already a subscriber of SymfonyCasts, you'll be able to watch the talks too! We're doing our best to publish them soon, but it depends on our provider reactivity.
We welcomed less than 500 attendees and it was just great! People had space to walk and move all around so they were never stuck. As we had a leftover of lunch boxes, despite the current context, we managed to give them away. We gave them to a French association called Action Partage from Neuilly sur Marne. It was very important for us not to waste the food leftover. Unfortunately, this year we were not able to recycle the lanyard and badge holders due to the current Covid-19 crisis.
We hope to see you soon physically at another conference. Stay tuned for the SymfonyTour 2021 announce! But before let's meet virtually at our first 100% online conference SymfonyWorld 2020, on December 3-4.
See you soon online!