Due to the COVID-19 crisis, NIWeek 2020 needed to be cancelled in order to protect the community. DSH Workshops looked into holding virtual DSH events so to not let all their preparations go to waste. Quickly, word spread and the LabVIEW community joined in, and together we organised #VIWeek!
Background of VIWeek
The cancellation of NIWeek was, of course, a terrible blow to the LabVIEW community. It also affected our DSH Workshops project, seeing as our workshops at and around NIWeek had to be cancelled, too.
All DSH gang members already had some experience with organising online events, be it User Group meetings or full-blown training. Seeing as we definitely still wanted to reach out to our peers, we decided to hold online DSH events during the days the original workshops would have taken place.
Other members of the LabVIEW community soon followed suit when Steve blogged about this, and #VIWeek spontaneously sprang to life (thanks, Chris, for the neat hashtag!). Together, we managed to organise many of the events that we otherwise would have sorely missed. In under 4 days, our community worked together to migrate the presentations, create a wiki and a homepage (thanks, Derrick!), a logo (Thanks, Q!) and even a Discord Channel (thanks, Mike!). Oh, and all of the presentations were streamed and recorded (thanks, Michael A.!).
In total, we managed to fill 6 days with the presentation. This way, #VIWeek was more an actual week than NIWeek itself. 🙂 You can read all the details of the history of #VIWeek on the LabVIEWWiki.
DSH Workshops at VIWeek
In addition to triggering #VIWeek, DSH Workshops was a very active participant. We had three public presentations during the event:
- In our initial appearance, the entirety of DSH was there; Fabiola, Steve, Joerg and Brian. This was the perfect opportunity to introduce ourselves to anyone who may not have heard of us yet and to discuss the general thematics and gauge what exactly the participants needed.
- The second presentation concentrated specifically on all the new features of DQMH 5.0. Fabiola, the director of Delacor herself, led through the features, with Joerg adding examples of how and where these features help with our real-life customer projects.
- Our final topic was soft skills. This essential, but often neglected part of an engineer’s repertoire is of special focus to Steve, who led the discussion.
Summary
In spite of the current circumstances, we were able to enjoy ourselves and manage our collective addiction to LabVIEW events. It was a valuable learning experience for us and for the participants too. Nonetheless, let’s hope we’ll still be able to see each other at the next NIWeek in 2021.
If you missed some of the presentations, or if you want to relive the fun, you’ll be happy to hear that most of the sessions were recorded (again, thanks to Michael A.!) and are now available at the LabVIEWWiki!