[Chat] Collecting general feedback about the conference?

[VM Brasseur]

> On Jan 25, 2017, at 22:03, Tim Serong via Chat <chat at lists.lca2017.linux.org.au> wrote:
> 
> Just to reiterate, it's not just papers and subsequent conf teams who
> can benefit from this.  It's *really* helpful for speakers to receive
> individual (constructive) feedback, even if it's never published, and
> never goes to papers/council.


As a recidivist speaker I can confirm that receiving feedback is the BEST. But I can also confirm that it doesn't really happen.

I had 18 conference presentations in 2016. 5 of them provided feedback mechanisms. I provided my own mechanism for 3 or 4 events. I received a grand total of 1 piece of feedback.

Even when conferences provide this feature, it's difficult to nearly impossible to get audience members to provide feedback. They just don't do it. They, understandably, have other concerns (conferencing). Anecdotally, the immediate in-person fill-in-the-card method receives a good response rate while all other methods are next to zero for response rate.

I've reached a point where it's just not worth it to me, as a speaker, to use any online feedback mechanism, either my own or provided by the conference. I'll certainly pay attention to the very few responses which dribble in, but I no longer expect any to appear. Instead, the first thing I say to anyone who thanks me for my talk is something along the lines of, "OMG, thank you for being there! How can I make the talk better?" This has been more effective for me than any online feedback mechanism.

Were a conference to attempt the immediate in-person fill-in-the-card method, I would be intensely interested in participating. But it's a lot of work on top of the already massive amount of work of organizing a conference, so I'm not about to suggest or expect a conference to do this.

tl;dr: Great idea & I support it, but experience shows it doesn't work.

--V