This page is a combination of feedback from a survey sent to participants and ideas from the organizers.
It focuses on improvements for next time and things that went poorly. However remember that 95% of the people that responded to the feedback survey were either "Satisfied" or "Very Satisfied" with the event as a whole.
Suggested changes for the next Developer Summit
We should do a three day event instead of a two day event. Two days will be similar to this year, one day will be hacking and networking.
Start using Phabricator earlier in the planning phase
Create templates for etherpads/Phabricator for all sessions
Organize keynotes further in advance
Presenters of smaller sessions should spend less time on introductions and jump into the needed discussions; introductory materials should be posted in advance.
This section is based on the fill-in-the-blank/comment sections of the feedback form. Some of these comments will be contradictory. We are mostly trying to include common themes and issues that were felt by groups of people. This section is a bit more subjective than the #Data section below.
The sessions were too technical for people who are not engineers or not relevant for to everyone's jobs
Interesting sessions were scheduled over each other and some people wanted to be in multiple places at once/missed out on discussions that they wanted to take part in
45 min was too short for some of the sessions
We crammed too much content in to two days
It would have been nice to have hacking/work time alongside the event
Post daily schedules for each individual room on the door of that room alongside the master schedule.
Not too much comment on using the wiki except that people agree that it is a good tool for keeping the overall schedule and an overview of the event as a whole. A few people did not realize we were using it at all, a few people think we should have used it more.
There was almost unanimous positivity about the use of etherpads at the WMDS. Only two comments about them being distracting/trolling. The biggest issue was that it crashed when we tried to get everyone using the same etherpad during a large session. There should have been more etherpad preparation by speakers before the sessions.
The use of Phabricator was more polarizing. In about half of the comments about Phabricator (not total number of comments about the tech we used), people felt that its use was "awkward," "forced," "messy," or "confusing." It helped with the planning phase, but many people agree that the planning phase should have started much earlier than it did. Using Phabricator to create tasks with next step action items during discussions was appreciated.
There were many positive-only comments, we are only including the constructive feedback. None of the points below were mentioned by more than a few people:
Encourage more people to walk, get fewer buses
Provide private buses for transport in the morning.
The venue was too far away from the office and hotel
Social events should encourage more mingling, not just stuck next to 1 or 2 people.
Encourage more walking and cab sharing to the venue. Maybe have a wiki page to organize morning taxi groups.
Four people did not like how far the venue was from the hotel.
Do not expect everyone from the event to take the bus on the way home, we had empty buses each day because a large percentage of people made other arrangements.
