MediaWiki Developer Summit 2015/Lessons learned

This page is a work in progress - lessons are a combination of feedback from a survey sent to participants and ideas from the organizers.

In order to be useful, this page will focus on improvements to be made 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.

Background on Feedback Survey

 * The feedback survey was created by rfarrand after the MediaWiki Developer Summit.
 * The feedback form opened on Feb 11, 2015
 * Two emails were sent to all WMDS participants 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. I am mostly trying to include common themes and issues that were felt be groups of people. This section is a bit more subjective than the "data" section at the end.

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
 * Individual room schedules posted on doors

Use of Etherpad, Phabricator & Wiki

 * More positive response to the use of all three tools simultaneously
 * Etherpad discussion/projection was fun and helpful
 * (lots more coming soon, this topics generated a lot of discussion....... -RF)

Transportation

 * Encourage more walking and cab sharing to the venue. Maybe have a wiki-page with 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