[Inpycon] Collated feedback

[Noufal Ibrahim]

The following is the collated feedback from the 30 minute discussion
after the AGM. I've interspersed some of my comments. 

1. Tutorials were very poor. Bad instructors and couldn't learn things.

- We should make it clear what the expectations from a tutorial are and
  should be *much* more rigourous about them. They need to be prepared up
  front and that's what we'll use to decide. It's not just a
  presentation and so the demands will be stricter. e.g. Slides in
  advance, much more detailed information etc.

- OTOH, maybe it is sensible to avoid tutorials all together. 3 days is
  harrowing for everybody and the separate registrations and stuff makes
  it quite hard. 

2. Infrastructure was poor. 

- A/V - This was a manpower and hardware problem as far as I can tell. I
  think if we havesome more time and dedicated hardware per room, we can
  fix this. 
- Internet - This could have also been solved if we had checked the
  upstream internet a few days before the event and managed it. It's a
  manpower problem. 
- Acoustics - I think Dharmaram has bad acoustics in it's halls. We
  should use a different venue. 

3. Website not good enough.

- This is a coding problem and we can fix it over time. Maybe even pay a
  professional designer to do over the visual aspects of the
  website. Eventframe is open source so we should be be able to add
  features that we need. Some that I can think of are.
   - Allow registered people to mark which talks they're attending after
     we select (but before we schedule them) so that we can mitigate the
     room overcrowding problem.
   - Export the schedule and other parts of the site which need to be
     printed into PDFs.
   - Integrate payment/registration into eventframe itself rather than
     use doattend. They have a separate database which we have to spend
     time and energy to ingest into our own.
   - Some way of providing anonymous feedback to presenters on the
     website. If a large audience is frustrated with a speaker, it
     should be possible to provide that as feedback. A simple +1, -1 scheme
     along with the talk might be sufficient. 

4. Punctuality - Talks were arbitrarily cancelled and rescheduled. 

- We need a central point to get the "official" schedule from. This has
  to work even if the net doesn't so I think a large board positioned
  centrally will work. 

- Modifications to the schedule without changing this are not
  acceptable. Anyone has a doubt, this will be the canonical place to
  get the latest data from. Tweets etc. are things people might miss. 

5. Poor talk quality - This was by far the biggest complaint. Following
   are some suggestions. 

- One hour is too long for a talk and gives people time to ramble. 30
  minutes of talk plus 10 or 15 minutes of questions. If it takes more
  than that, it's covering too much. 

- CFP and selection done *much* earlier with a larger review
  committee. Perhaps with multiple meetings of members (over IRC). We'll
  have to take into consideration the bio of the presenter and get a
  little brutal with selection. 

- Areas of talk and level of audience needs to be very clear. People
  need to take time to be clear about all this. 

- We might miss out some good speakers but I'm okay with that if we can
  filter out all the really bad ones. The net gain for the attendees
  will be higher.

6. Too tight a schedule - No sufficient gap between talk slots.                 

- We should keep 5 (or even 10) minutes of "free time" between slots and
  mercilessly enforce this. 

7. Lightning talks and open spaces

- We arbitrarily and on the fly created the "open room" A3. No one will
  use this.
- This should be part of the schedule, printed on everything so that
  everyone knows that it's there and uses it. 
- Last minute drastic changes with new ideas like "open spaces" are a
  bad idea.


I think we should start much earlier to avoid problems like this this
year. 



-- 
Cordially,
Noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in