Community Chair¶
The Community Chair leads the Community Committee: community outreach, Discord and the custom bot, streaming operations, the virtual experience, and attendee communications and aftercare.
Responsibilities¶
Pre-Event¶
- Run community outreach to the four Texas metro meetups (Austin, DFW, Houston, San Antonio) and coordinate meetup announcements with Marketing.
- Maintain the Discord server and the custom registration bot (hosted on DigitalOcean). Develop the bot like software: PR-reviewed, demoed in meetings, slash commands scoped to what is realistic by conference time (/poll, /question, /schedule first).
- Keep a second maintainer on the bot's registration integration; the bot fails for bulk corporate purchases (registering email vs attendee email), so have a manual fallback.
- Plan streaming operations on YouTube: test stream at least one week ahead, and train at least one backup on the full streaming and chat workflow. A solo streaming operator is a single point of failure if they get sick.
- Design the virtual experience: private attendee chat channel, engagement ideas (coding puzzles, setup photo thread, trivia and polls), and clear ticket messaging that states which days each ticket covers. Attendees without tutorial tickets show up Friday when the site only says a three-day range.
- Capture speaker Discord handles at intake so day-of Q&A follow-up works.
- Recruit walk leaders for the organizer-led group lunches and any extras (e.g. a nature walk).
- Build the signage map on the Miro board with Venue.
Day of Event¶
- Run the YouTube stream: go live 10-15 minutes early each day.
- Moderate Discord chat; post speaker links and socials live as talks progress, and route overflow Q&A to speakers in the channel.
- Compile every link shared in the conference-chat channel into one doc during the event, organized by day.
- Run the virtual engagement program and answer virtual attendee questions.
- Stick to one chat tool for day-of coordination; monitoring several chat tools at once does not work.
Post Event¶
- Send attendee aftercare communications and promote the post-event survey with Marketing.
- Finish the link-compilation doc and file it in the year's Drive folder.
- Get recordings onto pyvideo.org via a manual pull request to the pyvideo/data repo; this is a single-volunteer, unautomated process.
- Log virtual-experience lessons in the retro.
Relevant Runbooks¶
Past Virtual and Hybrid Chairs¶
Virtual and hybrid work ran as a separate chair role in 2024-2025 before folding into Community.
| Year | Name |
|---|---|
| 2024 | Josh Cannon |
| 2025 | Josh Cannon |