You Never See the Toolbar

A virtual event is the least human thing you can be asked to produce. A grid of webcams, everyone too close to their own laptop, somebody's mic muted for the third time. Nobody has ever felt a thing in a Zoom. NASA's aeronautics group asked us to put their research showcase online anyway, and the real job was to make two thousand people at their desks feel like they'd actually gone somewhere.

It started smaller — an in-person showcase that traveled between NASA centers for one slice of the aeronautics portfolio, then went virtual. The name wasn't mine; imaginAviation — imagine aviation, minus the "e," one word — was already the idea. What I took on was the production — and the bet that a virtual event didn't have to feel like one. We ran it three years straight. Two thousand-plus people an event, a hundred and fifty countries. Reach is easy — you can hit a hundred and fifty countries with a bad link. Presence is the hard one.

Behind five clean hours of broadcast a day — 8 to 1, Pacific — was a fairly ridiculous stack. Speakers waited in a green room that was really a NASA Teams call, where our team checked their audio and talked them down. I'd pull them into a backstage and bring them live. A separate machine fired title cards, transitions, and pre-records into the stream while I cut the whole thing in real time off switchers on my laptop. Chat questions surfaced on screen. Lower thirds named people as they talked. Any link in that chain hiccups, live, in front of a hundred and fifty countries — no take two.

You saw none of it. No desktop, no toolbar, no seam where one tool handed to the next — just a branded show that looked like it came out of a studio it very much did not. The whole craft was hiding the craft.

Same thing I believe about a logo: make it small. The version that looks effortless is just the one where you hid the effort well.

All that disappearing was for the least technical thing in the build. When you registered, we sent you a boarding pass. It did nothing — couldn't scan it, opened no doors. Just said: you're going somewhere, show up. We ran watch parties around the country and built the check-in for those too. One year it spun off a mentorship program. At some point it quit being a broadcast and turned into a place people gathered, which for a webcam grid is the only scoreboard I cared about.

I keep saying I — I architected it, directed it, cut it off my own laptop. That was my seat and I'll own it. But "I" is really "us": on the day there were other people in that green room checking everyone's camera, calming down speakers, watching the chat so I could watch everything else. None of the good stuff is one person.

I don't know if anyone else at NASA built one quite like this, and I won't pretend I can prove it. What I know is smaller. For a couple hours, a few years running, two thousand people alone at their desks felt like they were in the same room watching something that mattered. We got there by making every machine in the building vanish. Same trick I've always run — just on a stage made of software.