When the organizing team decided to make the Airflow Summit online, the call was “Let’s do it, but let’s make sure that we take advantage of this opportunity to involve those who wouldn’t have been able to attend the onsite event.”

The first request was to take advantage of the digital format to be able to space out the sessions over a longer period of time, in order to allow more participants to join live. So, we decided to make the event last a couple of weeks, with blocks of 3 talks every day.

The next idea was to involve different Airflow user groups (meetups) from around the world. “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we involve different meetups so that it would be as if each one is hosting the sessions for that day?”. We reached out and everybody liked the idea. We got confirmation from 9 different meetups: Bay Area, Seattle, New York City, London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Bangalore, Tokyo and Melbourne.

Now, the challenge was to decide at what time we should schedule the talks. We considered scheduling each block during the morning of each hosting meetup. For example, the block hosted by the London meetup would be during the morning of London time, and then the block hosted by Tokio would be during the morning of Tokio time, and so forth. However, we believe that this would probably make things too complicated and after a few days we would all have our heads spinning around. So, we decided to work on just two different schedule times: one that would work for both America and Europe, and another one for Asia.

  • Schedule A will be from 4-7 pm (UTC), which is 9am-12pm Pacific. This is used on blocks hosted by Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, London, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
  • Schedule B will be 4-7 am (UTC), which is 9pm-12am Pacific (of the previous day). This is used on blocks hosted by Bangalore, Tokyo and Melbourne.

The following table shows the schedule assignment

Block Host meetup Day and time
1 London Monday, July 6
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
2 NYC Tuesday, July 7
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
3 Bangalore Wednesday, July 8
4 to 7 am UTC (July 7 9pm-12am PDT)
4 Bay area Wednesday, July 8
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
5 Seattle Thursday, July 9
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
6 Bangalore Friday, July 10
4 to 7 am UTC (July 9 9pm-12am PDT)
7 Warsaw Friday, July 10
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
8 London Monday, July 13
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
9 Tokyo Tuesday, July 14
4 to 7 am UTC (July 13 9pm-12am PDT)
10 NYC Tuesday, July 14
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
11 Amsterdam Wednesday, July 15
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
12 Melbourne Thursday, July 16
4 to 7 am UTC (July 15 9pm-12am PDT)
13 Bay area Thursday, July 16
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)
14 Warsaw Friday, July 17
4 to 7 pm UTC (9am-12pm PDT)

As you can see, we will have 14 blocks (with 3 talks each) involving 9 meetups across 7 countries. The detailed schedule with the assignment per talk should be published in the event website very soon (probably by the time you read this).

All this looks a bit overwhelming and it does involve a lot of work, but this simple image from the participants chat that we grabbed today makes it so worth it:

Greetings chat

It will be quite an adventure, and we are very excited to have all of you on board.