I was frustrated with how much of a pain it is to organize coding conferences online. The webinar software out there simply sucks for the host and the attendee. I figured out a way to seamlessly use Google Hangouts to organize large-scale highly interactive virtual conferences, and I call it Crowdcast.

Here are some coding conferences that have used it so far: Hacksummit (30k attendees, http://ccst.io/e/hacksummit-2014), Genesis Camp (http://ccst.io/e/genesiscamp1), ANZCoders (http://ccst.io/e/anzcoders2015), Wordsesh (http://ccst.io/e/wordsesh)

You can set up multiple sessions with different panels and talks across multiple days. The architecture is built to scale. It's a client-side angular app primarily talking to Firebase. With this model I've been able to hold the world's largest virtual conference (http://hacksummit.org). We had everyone from DHH (creator of rails) to Hakon Le (inventor of css) speak.

To take it one-step further I added analytics around your event and Crowdcast keeps track of when you answer your audience's questions so that they can jump straight to the video answers once the event is over. Finally, your event is automatically recorded and instantly shareable.

Would love to see how the HN community uses this to organize their own conferences