Gurtam meetups: the first season is over, and we need your feedback

Gurtam temporarily stops releasing meetups. How? Why? What for?

We do still have lots of topics and cool speakers. However, we need some time to get ready and start the new season even brighter, particularly as we meet at the award ceremonies throughout August. The start date of the new season is already known! Gurtam will go on air in early September. Now let’s get things straight.

How it all started 

Gurtam meetups are a whole new project, and we risked a lot when launching it. Would the audience like the new way of interacting, and would it replace such an important face-to-face communication at conferences? But no pain, no gain, right? 

The COVID-19 pandemic ambushed the whole world, but we gave it our best shot and began our anti-crisis movement. We broke into the online space with existent but limited experience in hosting online events, but with a strong desire not to leave the community alone to fight the crisis.

Every week for almost six months, we have been providing you with meetups with our colleagues and invited experts. After the first meetup, we received positive feedback, and, putting aside any doubts, created our internal broadcast channel called Gurtam TV.

Some stats 

Through our community’s eyes, Gurtam meetups look like this: 

• 43 online meetings in Russian, English, and Spanish;
• 100+ participants in each meetup;
• five formats of participation: panel discussion, workshop, webinar, training session, Q&A session;
• the new meetups scheduled for each Thursday;
• commercial, technical meetups, and no-topic talks meetings for the partner community.

Some backstage info

You know, we felt the fear and did it anyway, and for us Gurtam meetups are:

• a smile on a face and trembling knees under the table. Even though our employees are real professionals with decent experience, some of them have never participated in live streams before;
• occasional technical failures at the most inopportune moments, which, luckily, went unnoticed;
• positive feedback from partners in personal correspondence;
• exciting and open-hearted conversations on relevant topics;
• constant diligent work on selecting relevant topics, searching for interesting experts, and communicating with them. And this work begins 2-3 weeks or even a month before the meetup and ends only 2-3 weeks after it;
• the rapid transformation of our offline events managers into video producers.

We need your help

We honestly told you about how it all began and how we came to the success of our risky project. For now, we kindly ask you to honestly tell us what you think about all this. We will prepare for the next season based on your suggestions and comments, so do not hesitate and share your opinion. As a result, we will see an objective view from the outside, and in the future, you will get improved content thanks to your opinion.

That’s not over yet

In between the Gurtam TV seasons, we will host three important events: awarding the winners in the Wialon TOP 50 Global and GPS Hardware Manufacturers TOP 10 ratings, as well as summing up the results of the IoT project of the year competition. Please find more details about the ceremonies in the article. And also submit your applications for participation in the competition by July 30. We are waiting for your project!