Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017/Lessons Learned

This page is a combination of feedback from a survey sent to participants, debriefs, physical help desk suggestions collected at the event, and ideas from the organizers.

It focuses on improvements for future Wikimedia run technical events and specifically focuses on things that went poorly and should be changed. Because we are focusing on "improvables", please keep in mind while reviewing that 94.1% of the people that responded to the feedback survey strongly agreed or agreed that the event was worth their time and 91.2% would like to attend a similar event next year. This is an attempt to improve!

Suggested Changes for the next Developer Summit Things to keep

Background on the Feedback Survey

 * rfarrand created the feedback survey form making some changes from last year.
 * The feedback survey began accepting responses during the last day of the Developer Summit, January 11.
 * Participants received two emails asking / reminding them to fill out the survey. The importance of completing the survey was also mentioned during the summit multiple times.
 * The deadline for filling out the feedback survey was February 2nd, the feedback survey was closed on February 3, 2017.
 * 68 out of 157 (43%) participants filled out the feedback survey.
 * Multiple in person debriefs with various parts of the organizing team were scheduled, tracked on a Phabricator task, and incorporated into the top section of this page.

Considerations for next year
This section is based on the fill-in-the-blank/comment sections of the feedback form. Some of these comments will be contradictory. I included common themes and issues that were mentioned by more than one or two people. This section focuses more heavily on areas that have room for improvement instead of things that went well. This section is a bit more subjective than the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017/Lessons Learned section below.

Remote Participation
This information is from the feedback survey that went out to people who participated remotely at the Wikimedia Developer Summit.

Survey background and statistics

 * 13 attendees filled out the survey form
 * As of now (a week after the summit) two of the main sessions: "Ward Cunningham- Has our success made it hard to see your own contribution?" and "Wikimedia Foundation Technology and Product Q&A" received 218 and 53 views on YouTube each.
 * 53.8% said they heard about the remote participation through an email received from WMF, 23.1% through WMF's social media channel, and 23.1% through other sources.
 * For 53.1% watching the YouTube video, for 15.4% reading the session notes, and for 15.4% participating in discussion on IRC channels were the most useful components of remote participation
 * 92.3% respondents said they would be interested in participating remotely in the future events and 69.2% opted-in to receive updates about the same

Inspiring quotes:
"'It was awesome to be able to watch all those sessions. And the notes were invaluable, saved so much time. It was great to have both, on some sessions I preferred reading the notes, on others watching the video'""'Keep doing this, if you can, for it opens up possibilities that would not otherwise be open'"

Things to improve for next time:

 * Audio quality
 * Camera placement (was more on the audience, and less on the speaker/ slides)
 * Check ahead of time what the formats for live-streamed sessions are going to be like. If a session is intended to be a breakout group style around whiteboards, it may not be that useful for the remote audience to participate
 * Some speakers were good at explaining the roles (such as note-taker, facilitator) at the beginning of their session, others were not. More efforts to recruit people for specific roles ahead
 * Streamed URLS changed (this happened as we made last minutes plans to stream and not to stream some sessions). Maybe consider unique YouTube links for all the sessions
 * Backchannel for organizers and remote advocates to discuss things like YouTube link updates, additional conference sessions, and information for participants in one place