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DevRelCon London 2019: Tweets, photos, and congrats

Community
December 18, 2019
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO
DevRelCon London 2019: Tweets, photos, and congrats
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I was really pleased and impressed with the 2019 edition of DevRelCon London: 2 days + 1 for workshops, 3 tracks, and over 50 talks. There was also a karaoke night with augmented reality 🎤😎

DevRelCon London is a part of a series of developer relations conferences that take place around the world each year. The events are touchstones for the tight-knit DevRel community.

I gave a talk called Communities aren’t funnels: Try the Orbit Model instead, which unpacked the marketing funnel's 122 year history, showed why it doesn't work for building community, and explained how the Orbit Model works as an alternative.

Tweets

I wasn't the only person talking about the funnel. A Tuesday morning talk from @TheSteve0 discussed how the developer journey isn't linear. Success is a combination of many different moments and interactions.

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Here's another slide from Steve's presentation:

Talking about the funnel tends to hit a nerve with DevRel folks. This moment was captured nicely by Mary Thengvall:

Sarah Thiam, a DevRel PM for Azure, gave a talk about authenticity, tracking your community in privacy-respecting way, and the value of relationships.

Jessica West gave a talk about the importance of getting executive buy-in and how to do it. The questions on these slides are worth memorizing.

Mary Thengvall shared the concept of DevRel Qualified Leads, which is a great model for thinking about how to track the DevRel's team contribution across the organization.

Did you know that the marketing funnel is 122 years old? Zoom in on the tweet below to see who invented it, and see a lot more talk photos in this live tweet thread from @IAmJerdog . Thanks Jeremy!

The video of the full talk will be coming out soon, but for now you can get the talk slides here.

Thanks and congrats

I want to offer a huge thanks to Matthew Revell, Carla Sofia Teixeira, and the whole Hoopy team for the amazing job they do, not just with DevRelCon London but the global series that includes events in San Francisco, Tokyo, and China. I honestly don't know how they do it with such a small team. H/T!

Lastly, the team at Orbit wants to publicly high-five Mary Thengvall for winning the DevRel award for Greatest Individual Contribution. Mary is more productive personally than most medium-sized teams. She supports this community in so many ways including her book, newsletter, mentoring, and all the wisdom she shares on Twitter. Congrats Mary! 🏆

Congrats also to TwilioQuest for winning Best Developer Education, DEV for winning Most Welcoming Community, Hacktoberfest for winning Best DevRel Program Overall and Honeycomb for winning Best New DevRel Program!

If you haven't been to a DevRelCon yet, I highly recommend it as a way to learn more about the profession and meet some truly remarkable people. The next one is in San Francisco in June 2020. Hope to see you there!

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