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Conference Retrospective

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 7 months ago

This is a quick summary of the results from the Agile 2008 Conference Retrospective.

 

Worked Well

  1. Stages: The stages concept was very popular with many "worked well" responses and was something we clearly want to keep next year
  2. Muzik Masti: Lots of positive feedback on this stage such as good talent, good equipment, the drum circle, and many requests to promote it more and make it more accessible.
  3. Open Jam: Many people commented on the open jam's great furniture and toys along with positive feedback on it's opening hours and ability to try new things there.
  4. Programming with the stars: A very popular session with comments like "do more, wonderful spectacle, lots of fun" with only a few minor AV glitches to sort out
  5. Submission system: A consensus that early, community, open peer review was successful and created early conversations around a topic
  6. Choice of selection: A wide and varied choice of talks
  7. Location: Toronto and the hotel were good choices
  8. More re-runs: The re-runs were popular and many people suggested that there be more of them.
  9. Wisdom of crowds keynote: Again a number of positive comments

 

Do Differently

  1. Level of topics: beginner/intermediate/advanced: A number of participants felt that it was hard to choose an appropriate session for their level of experience, the suggestion was that some way of catering to the beginner and experienced practitioner would be useful.
  2. Navigating the programme, space and website: Some troubles and usablity issues were reporting with finding rooms in the venue, reading the programme to find sessions and using the website.
  3. Too many things at once: A very very common issue for attendees was the number of concurrent tracks, sometimes causing very low attendence at some sessions. One suggestion was to limit the number of concurrent tracks perhaps to one per stage.
  4. Duration of sessions: It was felt that 90mins was too long for many sessions and that having generally shorter timeslots would allow for fewer concurrent tracks.
  5. Keynotes (community representation): it was felt that future keynotes need to have a clear objective and their value be clearly understood.
  6. Logistics: A few issues such as air conditioning set too high, lack of access to drinks, low quality of food, lack of options for vegetarians and insufficient signage were reported
  7. Mapping of abstract to session: Some sessions were felt they differed substatially from the abstract. It was suggested that alternative review processes should be considered such as a video review of presentations

 

Questions

  1. What should be the role of vendors? The increased emphasis and focus on vendors and commerical agile offerings was concerning
  2. Re run process: How should reruns be conducted to allow more people to see the topics they are interested in?
  3. Twitter: How do we use twitter and similar tools to allow the community to communicate at scale?
  4. Motivation for the conference: Can we define the acceptance criteria for the conference? Why are we doing it? Is it only to perpetuate itself or can we define clear outcomes we are looking for?

Yes, we do have acceptance tests for the conference approved by Agile Alliance and available to the Agile2008 committee on basecamp writeboard called Stories and Acceptance Tests for Agile2008--RachelDavies

 

Suggestions

  1. Few participants complained that the quality of talks they attended were not up to the mark. They suggested we ask the present to provide a small video about their session. This video can be hosted on a 3rd party hosting facility and a link can be provided. This will help reviewers make an informed decision.
  2. Have a conference info booth that can help participants decide which session they should attend
  3. Have speaker's affiliation printed in the printed program

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