LVIV, Ukraine — The third annual Lviv IT Arena conference had a distinct foreign accent – in more ways than one.
The conference, which took place from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 in the Lviv Arena football stadium in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, some 540 kilometers from Kyiv, featured as speakers tech specialists from world’s most famous IT companies, including Spotify, Microsoft, Uber, and Twitter. And all of them addressed the 2,000-or-so attendees in English.
One of the organizers of the event, Stephan Veselovsky, the CEO of the Lviv IT Cluster, a non-profit association of IT companies, told the Kyiv Post that this was by design.
“We wanted to make it international this time,” he said. “We simply didn’t invite a person who couldn’t speak English.”
Stephan Veselovsky, one of the organizers of the Lviv IT Arena conference and the CEO of the Lviv IT Cluster, a non-profit association of tech companies, talks to the conference audience on Sept. 30.
“The goal was to foster evangelists, ambassadors who will share information about Ukraine,” Veselovsky went on.
Lviv IT Arena was named the best tech event of last year, according to DOU, Ukraine’s most popular online portal for software developers. But in the previous two years, the working languages were Russian, Ukrainian and only sometimes English.
Veselovsky said that the decision to use English as the lingua franca of the conference reflected the rise in Ukraine of the tech industry – an industry that worldwide communicates largely in English – and the need for the domestic tech industry make itself known internationally.
“If such huge conferences take place in Ukraine, it signals that there’s a real IT market in the country,” he said. “Foreign experts can come, see and evaluate the pace of development of the Ukrainian IT industry.”
And as roughly 80 percent of the 75 speakers were foreigners, Veselovsky said that these experts would return to their countries and tell others about the level of IT they saw in Ukraine – and hopefully help bring more investors into the country.
Esther Dyson, a founder of HICCup and chairman of EDventure Holdings, talks with the audience about startups and her shares in Facebook at the Lviv IT Arena in Lviv on Oct. 1.
Veselovsky also underlined the importance of changing the conference agenda every year. This year, the conference was divided into four sets of panels: Hands-on Technologies, Technologies, Business, and Product. To help attendees plan an individual schedule according to their particular interests, the organizers even designed an application for Android and iOS devices.
Arsen Kostenko, a software engineer at Twitter, talks about the technical details of Twitter operations at Lviv IT Arena 2016. (Borys Viktjuk)
Apart from talks and discussion panels, the conference also included startup competitions and exhibitions of numerous promising startups. Ticket prices ranged from $100 to $200. The organizers have not disclosed the event’s budget.
And despite developing the conference for three years, Veselovsky said he would not expand his activity into other Ukrainian cities, but would continue to focus only on Lviv.
“The Lviv IT Cluster is a local organization, and we don’t have any plans to go beyond the city – we’re building everything in Lviv,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by Beetroot, Ciklum and SoftServe. The content is independent of the donors.
