MediaWiki Developer Summit 2015/Lessons learned

This page is a work in progress – 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 advice
 * Presenters of smaller sessions should spend less time on introductions and jump into the needed discussions, there can be written material to help get newbies up to speed.
 * Better food
 * Encourage people to walk/share taxis

Background on feedback survey

 * rfarrand created the feedback survey form after the MediaWiki Developer Summit.
 * The feedback form opened on Feb 11, 2015
 * WMDS participants received two emails requesting feedback.
 * The deadline for feedback was March 2, 2015.
 * 64/155 participants filled out the feedback survey

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 section below.

Schedule

 * 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.

Use of mediawiki.org, Etherpad, and Phabricator
Mostly positive response to the use of all three tools simultaneously

mediawiki.org
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.

Etherpads
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.

Phabricator
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.

Other thoughts

 * People did not sign up on the wiki for the talks that they ended up attending. Speakers would like a better headcount expectation.
 * Too many places with data about each session, there should be one consistent place for session overviews.
 * Session introductions should be posted before the sessions, the sessions should not waste time reintroducing the topic.
 * Phabricator tasks and Etherpads for each session should all use the same template so they are easy to read.

Logistics
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.
 * Don’t start as early in the morning
 * More mic runners in the main sessions

Food/Meals

 * More (healthy) options for breakfast
 * Don’t physically separate the vegetarians at dinner
 * Don’t use Buca di Beppo again
 * Different lunch options, buffet would be better

Transportation

 * 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.

Other

 * A fire alarm went off during the event and everyone needed to evacuate. This was annoying and disruptive to participants.
 * Let's start planning for this event even earlier next year
 * Three-day event, two days is not enough