It all started when someone said, "I'd actually like to talk about our CMS a bit further at some point," and I had the idea to create space for this conversation. Quickly, the idea of the CMS Summit was born. So on the 13th, I invited our colleagues for a short afternoon of focused discussion on this topic.
Insights for co-creation
Planning this event was a lot of fun. In 2021, I could help out as a Co-Organizer at the official Eleventy Meetup and got a taste of what it means to set up something similar. So I felt prepared. But I wanted to make this as collaborative as possible, so I needed to organize the event around my colleagues. The easiest way I could think of without assuming to know what they needed and wanted was to survey them. So I did.
I asked all sorts of questions regarding the structure of the event. These questions helped me decide how to approach the planning:
- "Do you think we should do this at all?" (88.9% yes)
- Should we have a single time slot or multiple time slots for various topics? (55.6% said "all in one go," 22.2% said "multiple time slots on a single day," 11.1% said "multiple time slots over multiple days," and 11.1% said "it depends if there are breaks.")
- "What should we fill the time slots with?" (77.8% wanted talks and showcases; 44.4% wanted panel discussions and tutorials; this was a multiple choice question!)
And then there were questions about whether they wanted to contribute. Luckily, I found people who were interested in participating!
Insights for ourselves
In addition to questions about the event itself, I also took the opportunity to ask a bit about CMS in general. I wanted the event to provide a chance for us to not only expand our knowledge about CMS but also give us insight into our own attitudes and experiences with them!
Quite unexpectedly, 44.4% of us had never actually worked with a CMS before. I asked those of us who had an extended set of questions, and they proved to be very insightful after all. These answers would become the content of the opening talk I decided to hold for the event, along with two other talks on the topic.
Talks!
Florian Bacher and Martin Vasco donated their time and knowledge to dive into a CMS-related topic and create a little talk from it. While Florian experimented with builder.io and presented his findings, Martin showed us how he had been using sanity.io in the past.
In both talks, discussions happened after the talk was finished. This was the purpose of this event after all: to provide dedicated time and space to exchange opinions, experiences, and knowledge about this topic. But it did shift our schedule a bit. It accumulated over time, and eventually, we withdrew by 45 minutes.
And then it was done.
In addition to the live content via talks and the event itself, I wanted to ensure that those who couldn't participate at the time could still benefit from the event. So, besides the talks at the event, I also planned a stream of static content fitting the subject that we could engage with afterward. In addition to those two blog posts, which were part of this static content stream, I also prepared a post on our internal blog.
It's quite difficult to find a sense of "ending" with an event that is intended to be participated in asynchronously as well. But eventually, after two weeks, I considered the CMS Summit done. To gain insight into how it all went, I once again deployed a survey to ask about this event and its future.
The results are in!
I can't share all of the numbers publicly. But here are some shareable numbers that indicate success to me:
- 80% of people had the opportunity to talk about the topic with colleagues outside of the event's contents.
- 80% of people read the static content.
- 100% of participants think we should do this again.
- 80% of people rated the event 8/10 for how much it matched their expectations.
- 80% of people rated the event 10/10 for how much they liked the event in general.
- 60% of people rated the first survey's insights 7/10 for how much it changed their view on CMS usage in our company.
- 80% of people rated the event 7/10 for how much it helped them learn something new about CMS in general.
Now that's some exciting stuff! Here is some specific feedback the event received:
But we also wanted to know what we could improve on:
The Conclusion
Oh, we're doing this again. For sure. The feedback is very clear—that we found it useful and want it to happen again! The format in general has the potential to change focus, and our colleagues agree with this. Who knows what the next summit will be about?
Luckily, the next time can only be better. Not only because we now have the experience of the first summit, but also because we have direct feedback from its participants on how to improve it for them.
