Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018/LessonsLearned

THIS PAGE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

The lessons learned from the Wikimedia Technical Conference feedback survey will be published here.

Suggested changes for next time

The best


 * The emphasis and clear effort by the group to determine clear goals, questions, actions, and decisions.
 * The facilitation & participation (vs a presentation/discussion style) oriented sessions
 * The flow of the event / the event's progression
 * Productive / positive conversations

The worst


 * The Portland location was a further away / harder travel location
 * Session leaders did not get enough warning or time to prepare / thus sessions were not prepared adequately
 * WMF upper management not participating / clearly engaged

Feedback Survey Background

 * rfarrand created the feedback survey with using google forms based on feedback survey questions from past events and input from the program committee.
 * The Feedback Survey was sent out to participants on December 10, 2018
 * The survey received 22 responses (44% response rate)

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. 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 and suggestions may be paraphrased and combined with each other or just pasted as-is.

What did you like most about the Wikimedia Technical Conference?

 * Discussions with others
 * Volunteers and their heavy participation
 * Small group dinners
 * Clear effort by the group to determine clear goals, questions, actions, and decisions.
 * Learning other peoples concerns
 * Good atmosphere
 * The order and flow of the event
 * The facilitation. The fact the sessions were organized in ways to optimize the participation (vs a presentation/discussion style) and output was great.
 * Activity oriented sessions
 * Collecting point of views about topics during the sessions and not making decisions on the spot! for that shows planning and a creation of a plan as opposed to hack things around.
 * Longer event
 * Good note taking
 * We had important discussions with the right people in the room.
 * That product and technology finally were forced to talk productively
 * The no device rule
 * The focus feeling of the event
 * Hallway posters
 * Organizing the conference topics into stages from strategy to product to architecture made the program much easier to navigate (although it also meant that often similar things happened in parallel and expert participation was split).
 * It felt very productive. The feeling of "thing can get done" was really intense.
 * Opportunity to highlight some long-term issues and set up a plan and responsibilities for addressing them

What did you like least about the Wikimedia Technical Conference?

 * Long days
 * C-levels not engaged
 * Missing voices
 * needed more understanding around if the decisions will be carried forward
 * Multiple tracks
 * Portland location (hard travel)
 * Use less paper
 * To many topics were covered, harder to come to decisions
 * No unconference
 * Not enough time to prepare

Anything else that needs to change to make a similar event more successful in the future?

 * More preparation by session leaders / start earlier
 * Glossary of terms for session, to be sure the audience is talking about the same thing, would be nice
 * Make sure session leaders have full grasp of the topics
 * One time slot per day for presentation sessions
 * Better ways for people not attending to participate
 * The program consisting of different stages (strategy, use cases, architecture) that build on each other was an interesting idea, but I don't think much building upon actually happened (nor was there much attempt to facilitate this - the documentation sessions seemed to be an attempt at that but I don't think that worked out).