evaluate participants survey
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Description

We should do a quick evaluation of the survey results to extract learnings and todos for next year.

lydia created this task.Jul 27 2017, 9:46 AM

Here's a brief summary from me. Note that I only looked at complete responses, although it's possible to export the incomplete ones as well (or manually go through them and extract meaningful information).

There were 69 complete responses to the survey.

23 of them were Akademy speakers, 27 were KDE contributors.
6 described themselves as users of KDE software, 7 as other FLOSS community members, and 3 as general public.
3 declined to answer. No one from press.

A little more than 70% have attended Akademy before. We could try to think of ways to increase the number of first-time attendees for 2018.

The majority of attendees were between 25 and 44 years old. As was probably expected, most of them came from Germany and Spain.
There were a few from France and the UK, 4 from India, 3 from the US, and 3 who chose not to answer.
Other countries were represented by 1 or 2 attendees, and those were mostly European.
Although the KDE Community is pretty strong and active in South America, there were only a couple of attendees from there.

The primary sources of news about Akademy 2017 taking place were KDE mailing lists and websites, followed by social media, word of mouth, and KDE IRC channels.
Reddit, online and local news sources weren't very successful, so maybe we can focus on targeting them next year.
The responses in the "Other" category were mostly from people who were actually part of the organization team.

The overall rating of the Akademy 2017 experience was pretty good - almost 48% rated it as 4/5, and around 32% gave the conference a 5/5 rating. :)

When it comes to improvements for the next Akademy, promotion leads as the area that should be improved most (and I agree - this year we kind of fumbled with promotion and probably didn't even start promoting the conference early enough). This is followed by communication with attendees and the "Other" category - these two answers had the same percentage (~25%).

The majority of complaints in the "Other" category referred to the venue; more specifically, accessing the venue itself and the city where the conference took place, as well as to the signs around the venue, and the equipment provided to the attendees (power cords).
The second major complaint was the way registration was organized.
Attendees also think we should improve the schedule by varying the length of talks and breaks, as well as by announcing the schedule changes on time.
2 out of 17 who responded were not happy with the food.

No one reported CoC violations, which is great, although 5 people declined to answer this question.
One person chose the "I'm not sure" answer, but did not provide a detailed account of any problematic situation.
(This might be because they were not familiar with the CoC, so that's why they chose that answer. Maybe we can work on improving the visibility/clarity of the CoC and the way(s) in which it is enforced.)

Finally, the last question provides us with a "wishlist", or a list of ideas for speakers and topics for the next Akademy.
A little more than 50% of attendees answered this question.

Some suggestions that stood out or were suggested by more than one person:

  • talks about Plasma Mobile, Project Halium, convergence, and cross-platform projects
  • workshops for beginners
  • introductions on how to start contributing to KDE
  • technical tutorials and in-depth talks on software development (Qt, C++...)
  • invite speakers from other FLOSS communities that work on similar goals as KDE

You can see the whole list of suggestions, as well as the answers to other questions, in the PDF attached.

I removed all ID numbers from answers that had them, and the survey was anonymous anyway, so I hope it's not a problem that I'm sharing the results this way.
However, if this does violate some rules, please let me know and I will remove the file.

Correction: when I wrote "A little more than 50% of attendees answered this question." above for the last question, I meant 50% of the attendees who took the survey.
Sorry about that.

duffus added a subscriber: duffus.Jul 31 2017, 11:33 AM

Well we can probably ignore the registration complaints

I'm not aware of talks in the schedule that didn't happen. Does anyone else know of them? There were some issues with talks over-running due to bad management by session chairs, we plan to work more on training/info for them next year and maybe being more selective about who does them

aacid added a subscriber: aacid.Jul 31 2017, 8:11 PM

I'm not aware of talks in the schedule that didn't happen. Does anyone else know of them?

There were some last minute cancellations that made the schedule have some holes in room 2 on Sunday.

Also we cancelled the last lighting talk on Saturday the same day but i really don't think anyone realized.

duffus added a comment.Aug 1 2017, 6:03 AM

OK so one lightning talk change wasn't in the schedule then that I'd forgotten about, so pretty good then

paulb added a comment.Aug 2 2017, 10:22 AM

Also we cancelled the last lighting talk on Saturday the same day but i really don't think anyone realized.

Second to last. Mine was last and I went directly after Agustin, when in theory there was someone else in between. I have this taken form the original program:

Then Annu Mittal will talk about all the application domains and various programs currently running in KDE, namely: Season of KDE, Summer of Code, and Outreach Program for Women. She will follow up by explaining the various ways you can get involved with KDE, both from the technical and non-technical point of view.

But, you are right, both Agustin's and my talks ate into that time anyway.

duffus closed this task as Resolved.Sep 26 2018, 12:21 PM
duffus claimed this task.