[Chat] Collecting general feedback about the conference?

[Tim Serong]

On 01/24/2017 09:24 PM, Jan Groth via Chat wrote:
> First of all: I had a great time in Hobart and would very much like to
> thank everyone who participated and contributed to the conference!
> 
> After Geelong 2016 this was my second Linuxconf, and it's probably
> only natural to compare the two events:
> 
> While 2017 certainly was a good conference, I must say that I found
> 2016 far more relevant for me. That is more talks about topics that I
> consider interesting and relevant, and fewer talks about topics that I
> didn't manage to connect to.
> 
> I'm sure that others have a different perception - which is perfectly
> fine - but I was wondering if there are channels to collect this kind
> of feedback (ideally in a more systematic and fine-grained way)?

There's nothing official along those lines for LCA 2017.  Some F/OSS
conferences have wound up with ad-hoc speaker feedback on third party
sites (lanyrd maybe?) but I'm not sure if that's happened for LCAs or
not offhand.

>From some previous discussions I've had there's at least a few ways
speaker feedback could potentially be facilitated in future:

- Build a rating thingy into the conference web site, so delegates can
rate talks (delegates have to remember to rate talks).
- Same as above, but with a mobile app.
- Hand out bits of paper at each talk to collect feedback (either "tick
the boxes", or a simpler "dump red/amber/green pieces of paper in a
bucket as a hand-wavey quality metric")

The paper based options probably get more feedback from more people than
the online ones, but are more load on volunteers.

> Taking that idea one step further: For future conferences, would it be
> worthwhile to collect feedback on a talk / presenter level?
> 
> * I've seen a few outstanding presentations and certainly wouldn't
> mind letting the speaker know about it.
> 
> * I also went to talks where someone presented massive walls of text
> and simply read out slide after slide after slide in a very monotonous
> voice. The guy next to me even fell asleep, I'm not making this up.
> 
> * Sometimes only very small things went wrong, e.g. the presenter
> typing into the bottom line of a console - which only the people in
> the front row could see, but everyone else being too polite to mention
> / yell out.
> 
> If I was a speaker I would be very happy to receive this kind of
> feedback and try to improve for the next time.

Likewise.  I really appreciate feedback when I've been a speaker,
because it helps me in my attempts to improve my presentations.

Cheers,

Tim