Share feedback about GUADEC 2015 here

Volunteers

• needed more t-shirts for volunteers

• new system for assigning volunteers will be made by Patrick
  • allow volunteering on registration
  • allow self-assigning to slots
  • allow specification of t-shirt sizes (with the caveat that it might be completely ignored)

Badges

• Using a larger font for the name would be very helpful.
• Shorter lanyards so the badge is at the chest - Cant read them dangling down by the stomach.

  • Stares at chest level are not always appreciated, DebConf offer a badge clip as an alternative to lanyards, which is probably the best solution. There are also enough badges for 2016 so can otherwise only be resolved in 2017.

• Why did we stop putting the IRC nicks on the badges?
  • RESOLVED - IRC nicks were added to the system
• Would be neat to have stickers that attendee could put on for individuals to self-identify as volunteer, first-time GUADEC attendee, speaker, etc.
  • A simple color code (ex: colored dot stickers that are often found in office supplies) could work

Schedule

Good things

• Having the interns' lightning talks on the first day helped to put names to faces.
• Ending on the general lightning talks session was great - it felt informal and lighthearted.
• We allocated enough time for the AGM.
• The schedule felt relaxed, particularly the long lunch.
• The days didn't feel like they went on too long (possibly helped by the long lunch). Starting at 10:00 felt much nicer than 9:00.
• Having schedules end at 19:00 lead to no downtime until evening events. I never felt bored. (BoF days ending at 18:00 had that problem to an extend).
• Keynotes after lunch worked well - they were well attended.
• The venue's universal display output converter (all variants of HDMI, displayport, etc.) in the main hall was brilliant. We should have these in our event supplies.

• More than usual talks from other communities (Meson, FreeIPA, LibreOffice, Rust), this felt great. Want more of this for next year (hearing from the guys maintaining GNOME 3 in FreeBSD would be great for example).

Things to think about for next year

• The lunch break was too early for some people.
• The talk slots were often too long (including the keynote sessions), although this wasn't universal - some ran to time or even overran. Should we cut down the time?
• More lightning talks?
• Three conference days feels a bit much. We could aim to have something like two conference days and three well attended BOFs days.

General

• Eating out was quite expensive. Specially dinner. We've done two expensive countries in a row, we should really consider something cheaper for next years.
• T-shirts design is too simple and small, hope next year the local team could make a better one.
• Registration at first day is too slow, wish we could use more quick way, such as using several phones to scan bar-code at the same time.
• It would be nice to open up the BoF days, particularly to new contributors. Ideas for this:
  • Rename the BoF days to "hack days" or similar.
  • Ensure that a general hacking room is advertised.
  • Set up a noticeboard where people can advertise topics that they are interested in working on.
• We should encourage photographers to provide pictures for use on the web. It would be great if a request could be made at the start of the conference, for photographers to:
  • Try and take general purpose, promotional pictures.
  • Tag them so we can find them (using GUADEC keywords on G+, Flickr, etc).
  • Upload them ASAP.
  • License them in such a way that they can be reused.
• Missed the running Twitter feeds shown at the registration desk, etc. that we had in previous years.
• Videos were uploaded impressively quickly, great job!
• Maybe try to convince Jakub to bring one of his multi-rotors next year, so the group photo won't need to be taken through a closed window :P