Wikimedia Developer Summit/2016/Lessons Learned

This page is currently a draft.

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.

Suggested Changes for the next Developer Summit

Things to keep

Roles / role cards

Un-conference during first two days

Hackathon 3rd day

Background on Feedback Survey

 * rfarrand created the feedback survey form during the Developer Summit.
 * The feedback survey began accepting responses during the last day of the Developer Summit, January 6.
 * 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 January 18th, the feedback survey was closed on January 19th.
 * 84 out of 155 (54%) participants filled out the feedback survey.
 * An in personal retrospective will be scheduled for the week of January 25th, 2016. Notes from that meeting will be posted.

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 #Data section below.

Common Themes

 * There was a good range of topics and it was hard to choose between sessions.
 * The session descriptions could have used a lot of work. They were too long or unclear and it was hard to understand what the session was going to be about.
 * It was helpful to assign roles
 * The sessions were not friendly to people without technical backgrounds
 * The process for scheduling these sessions was "unclear," "overwhelming," and "messy." The process changed at the last minute and and confused everything further.
 * The overview of how the sessions were going to work was helpful in the beginning. The language rules of engagement should have been more internationally targeted, different things are offensive or not in different cultures.
 * The larger sessions were less productive and often without resolution. Sometimes the purpose of the session was completely unclear.
 * Presenters were well prepared

Suggestions for next time

 * All sessions should have a clear "goal" at the top of its description.
 * Session scheduling process should be worked out at least a month in advance and not changed.
 * Pre-event IRC or hangout with information on what to expect in the prescheduled sessions so it is easy to choose.
 * Wrap-up session was not a good use of time, change it and shorten it. Questions from wrap up should have been discussed on a mailing list.
 * keynote

Common Themes

 * People liked them and found them to be engaging and useful. The smaller unconference sessions were lead by passionate speakers and resulted in great knowledgeable conversations.
 * Hard to choose between sessions
 * Roles cards were useful but people did not always stick to using them. More facilitation to make sure people don't forget next time.
 * The scheduling was unfair. It was stated that you could not schedule in advance, but some people did and got to keep their spot.
 * Mixing scheduled and unconference is weird. It also makes it hard to pre plan your time at the Summit.

Suggestions for next time

 * Encourage more community run sessions
 * Ensure enforcement of roles
 * Sessions should have better agendas
 * Unconference should be better explained in advance for those not familiar.
 * Define unconference. To some people it means needing to vote on sessions in advance. To others it means more fluidity and encouraging people to get up and move between sessions. Build in "you can leave now" breaks in the middle?

Most valuable session
Most mentioned:

(TODO: add actual session names / associated tasks + send positive feedback to session leaders)
 * Real time collaboration
 * Unconference Day
 * Code Review
 * Community Wishlist
 * Content format
 * Community Relations
 * Shadow Namespaces
 * Mediawiki Stakeholders

changes
Need a better way to track where people are and what they are talking about (white board?).