[Chat] Collecting general feedback about the conference?

[Tim Serong]

On 01/25/2017 06:08 PM, Michael Lake wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I'm generally in favour of a talk rating system but it would not be nice to have a system whereby the rating of all speakers is public knowledge.
> Some speakers would be at the bottom of the barrel. That's good for the organisers to have but not to be made public just out of courtesy.

Good for speakers too.  If my talk sucked, I want to know about it.  But
I take your point about ratings being non-public by default.

> One could though also have a public rating system of the top, say 10 talks.  That way the bottom of that list is still being rated amount the top 10% of all talks.

I like that idea.

> Having a way to have private non-anonymous or anonymous feedback to the speaker, either good or suggestions for improvement, is fraught with ethical problems. It would be good to provide a way for attendees to provide feed back but we can't have a system whereby people can just heap shit on some speaker anonymously. It's a difficult problem to solve.

If it's paper-based, everyone going into a talk gets one bit of paper
(difficult to abuse).  If it's website based, all raters have to be
registered conference attendees, be logged in, and are allowed one
rating per talk (anonymously at rater's request).  In either case, if
someone's going to be an asshole, at least they only get one shot per
talk.  Most of us won't be assholes, so the constructive/positive should
outweigh the nasty.  Worst case, all feedback could be moderated by
conference organisers/volunteers if bad behaviour is seen to be a
significant risk.

Tim

> 
> Mike Lake
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: Chat [chat-bounces at lists.lca2017.linux.org.au] on behalf of Tim Serong via Chat [chat at lists.lca2017.linux.org.au]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 3:56 PM
> To: chat at lists.lca2017.linux.org.au
> Subject: Re: [Chat] Collecting general feedback about the conference?
> 
> 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
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> 


-- 
Tim Serong
Senior Clustering Engineer
SUSE
tserong at suse.com