T3CON24 Recap - Why Independent Community Events Matter
The role in-person events play in our lives has shifted in recent years. The explosion of screen time and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic have raised interesting questions: are in-person festivals and conferences still relevant? Do such events still meaningfully contribute to community building?
In his talk at T3CON24, Marc Thiele explored the changing landscape of organizing independent community events. He talked attendees through his journey into conference organizing, shared his insights into what it takes to produce festival-sized events, and the advantages of supporting independent events within our communities.
Marc Thiele
beyond tellerrand
Marc Thiele has over 23 years of experience in community events organization. He is the founder, owner and producer of beyond tellerrand, a conference covering topics at the intersection of arts and tech since 2010.
The path to independent community events organization
Thiele began by sharing some of his journey towards founding beyond tellerrand. He started by discussing his time at school, which, he admitted, was not the best environment for him. “I enjoyed hanging out with my friends a lot— but the subjects, and the way school is structured in Germany, were quite boring most of the time,” he shared. “Nobody could ever explain to me why I had to learn certain things I didn’t want to learn.” By the time he left, Thiele wasn’t certain what he wanted to do with his life— but he knew it had something to do with arts, music, and creativity.
Initial steps towards community and creativity
After graduation, he took a job working in a youth facility. “I was already organizing children's holiday camps for six years in France during the summer breaks,” Thiele said. “But it turns out that working with children from the street on a daily basis is a completely different thing from taking them on holiday. I have respect for anyone working in that field, but I couldn't do it.” However, Thiele already started to gather hints about his career direction during this time: he was passionate about organizing concerts in the youth facility, and was spending his leisure time on playing games on his Commodore 64.
A friend of Thiele’s was programming a bulletin board system (BBS): a forum that users could dial into via a terminal. His friend knew Thiele was passionate about art, so asked Thiele to draw graphics for his BBS. “I said no,” Thiele admitted. “Only 16 colours, and all those pixels? But we met some friends of his from demo days, and after a couple of beers, they convinced me. It was very limited, but I fell in love with the limitations.” Through these drawings, Thiele and his friends came to attend demo parties across Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Thiele was captivated by the collective spirit at these parties: meeting new people, making friends, and actively creating things with people from other disciplines.
Focusing on conference organization and community events
After completing an apprenticeship, Thiele moved into design and digital graphics, and eventually went freelance in 1990. Around the same time he was attending Flash workshops and eventually began working for Flashforum, Germany’s largest forum for Flash users and developers, which had over 120,000 members at its peak. As part of this work, Thiele attended the Flash Forward Conference in Amsterdam. “I instantly thought ‘I'm back home—I'm back at those demo parties’,” Thiele said. The wide applications of Flash also meant that the conference attracted attendees from multiple disciplines: “there were illustrators, animators, and people working in the film industry. And I thought to myself, I want to do this,” Thiele shared. He began organizing the FlashForum Konferenz that same year. The first edition welcomed 250 attendees, and Thiele went on to organize the event annually for the next decade.
The switch from FlashForum to beyond tellerrand was sparked by Thiele’s brother. After being diagnosed with cancer and told he only had three years to live, Thiele’s brother decided to focus on the things he most wanted to do. This, in turn, led Thiele to reexamine what was important in his own life. “I thought, well, conferences is the one thing that I want to do. I love connecting people. I love bringing people together to show them new things and inspire them,” Thiele said. But he had the idea to bring together people beyond Flash— to create a community event covering illustration, animation, typography, content, and web design. Thus, beyond tellerrand was born.
Lessons for community event organizers
Thiele founded beyond tellerrand in 2010. At first, Thiele found himself asking: Will anyone come? Will we book any speakers? Will this make any money? Thiele decided he would give himself three years to see if he could turn his idea into a popular and profitable project. Today, beyond tellerrand is still going strong. There are now multiple editions of the annual conference across German cities.
Here are some of his key lessons from establishing community events:
- Listen to your gut feeling. “Many things could’ve gone wrong, but I always trusted myself,” Thiele said. He highlighted that he specifically recommends trusting your intuition, which is different from trusting that things will always work out for you. For example, if you have a call with a client and your gut feeling says you shouldn’t go for it, Thiele recommended listening to that feeling. “You have to be honest with yourself. After three years, if I felt like beyond tellerrand wasn’t working, I would have stopped,” he added.
- Commit to the project 100%. Community events organization is a lot of hard work. You often don’t reap the rewards for a long time after the offset and there will likely be times when you question your commitment. Thiele’s advice is to set a timeline, like his three year goal, and commit yourself wholeheartedly to your project’s success during that period.
- Cultivate honesty and reflection. When you need to deeply reflect on how things are going, Thiele recommends documenting your progress, and writing down the current state of the project. “Then I sit down and read it, and reread it. Sometimes, from that perspective, it doesn’t look as good I thought,” Thiele admits— but starting from this place of honesty gives you the chance to course-correct.
- Stay calm. At one edition of beyond tellerrand which was beset by technical issues, one attendee asked Thiele how he could stay so calm. His answer was simple: “If I’m freaking out— and the audience can see I’m freaking out— this doesn’t work.” Things will always go wrong during live events— accept that, and focus on providing the smoothest and calmest experience possible.
- Accept the good as well as the bad. Thiele shared that it wasn’t just misfortunes he had to learn to accept. He also had to cultivate skills to accept positive feedback gracefully, and to really absorb what people found valuable about the events he organized. “That’s the real payment— way better than the money,” he said.
Why independent community events matter
Thiele highlighted that there are many excellent events sponsored by huge companies such as Adobe or Figma— but he believes independent community events provide certain specific benefits to community ecosystems. Chiefly, attendees can have a much more tangible impact on shaping independent community spaces. The community is much more likely to be built by word-of-mouth than expensive marketing campaigns, meaning event attendees are much more directly involved in who joins the community. Additionally, the impact of feedback is different for independent events. Where large, corporate-sponsored events will take feedback into consideration in aggregate, smaller events are more equipped to act on and implement individual critique. In turn, when people see their feedback being listened to and implemented, they’re more thoughtful about the criticism they offer. “Most people really want to help you improve, because they want to enjoy the events,” Thiele highlighted.
Independent community events can also offer both specificity and diversitythat larger events might struggle to capture. Catering to a smaller number of attendees gives independent event organizers the opportunity to focus on niche topics and place focus on local communities. Independent events also have greater freedom to experiment and welcome new ideas and perspectives. “They’re able to welcome underrepresented groups and provide a platform for diverse voices that may be excluded from corporate events, which are always curated with a particular brand image in mind,” Thiele shared.
One of the challenges independent events face is getting companies to agree to send their employees there. Whereas bigger corporate events are often laser-targeted at businesses, sometimes independent offerings struggle to offer a tangible ROI to corporations. It’s difficult to quantify the exact value of employees being exposed to new ideas, building their networks, and being exposed to new problems— and the value loss of time spent away from desk feels very concrete in comparison. But Thiele urged businesses to acknowledge the value that independent events add in terms of energizing, inspiring, and motivating their teams.
Takeaways
Ultimately, whether an event is corporate or boutique, what’s most important is getting out and connecting with new people. The amount of time we spend looking at screens has exploded in recent years, helped in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thiele shared the impact that this had on him as an independent events organizer: people are booking tickets much closer to the event, meaning long-term events planning and organization has been challenging. Emphasizing the mental health benefits of in-person contact and community building, Thiele thanked those who support TYPO3 events, and encouraged people to keep actively participating in communities that matter to them.
Did you enjoy this recap? If you would like to relive all the exciting moments from T3CON24, be sure to check our our recap of the entire conference!
