For every successful tech conference, there’s a team responsible for organizing all of the details, presentations, arrangements and scheduling, without whom the event would be well-intentioned chaos.

Leigh Day, VP of Marketing Communications at Red Hat, Inc., spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at this year’s Red Hat Summit. They discussed the part her team played in setting up the Summit, their work to engage community participation and the plans to make next year’s event even more impressive.

Keeping creativity fresh

As Day explained, her team handles creative elements at Red Hat, finding ways to engage customers, improve brand visibility and create ways of showcasing their open-source advantages. Looking at the large turnout for this year’s Red Hat Summit, Day was quite happy with the results, particularly in regards to the feeling of connectivity. “One thing that I’m really proud of is we’ve been able to maintain a sense of intimacy. … There’s a really good energy, and we see a lot of alumni come back year after year,” she said.

She was also pleased with the reactions to Red Hat’s Open-Source Stories, a series of videos that connect human stories, such as someone undergoing brain surgery, with the roles open-source technologies play in their experiences. Her team is already hard at work in devising more entries to the series, though Day pointed out that with many of the possibilities, the tech takes a back seat to the human narrative.

“We obviously have a lot to showcase in terms of technology … but we also want to show our soul, we want to show people what it’s like to be a part of Red Hat,” she said.

Working together

“Many people come to Red Hat because they want to work for a mission-based company,” Day noted, and she felt that having such a shared motivation did a lot to improve team synergy. That unity of purpose is particularly helpful in teams like her own, where the various ideas have to be drawn together into a coherent whole for presentation.

For setting up events like the Red Hat Summit, Day said, “The first thing we do is work with the team to come up with interesting design themes.” From there, they proceed by finding ways to expand from those themes, as they’ve done by including creative corners and participation squares at this year’s event, getting people to participate while surveying their preferences for usage and design.

“We’re all about communities, we like to showcase them and allow people a place to talk to each other. … Highlighting these communities, showing how the power of participation is real, that’s important,” she said. And her team is already preparing for several more events, keeping in mind that “the best ideas come from anywhere,” with next year’s Summit one of them.

As Day explained, “It really is a whole year in planning [to set up the shows],” but in that time, they have opportunities to put emerging trends and new tech to work for them.

Stay tuned for the full video interview, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE