DebConf15/Feedback

We would like to have your feedback, especially suggestions or negative feedback, so we can try to fix it/do something about it while DebConf still lasts!

At some point, we'll choose a feedback submitter at random and send them a Chromebook donated by our Platinum sponsor HP.

By Mail

You can mail feedback@debconf.org

By Wiki

Just edit this section, add your name (if you like) and your feedback/criticism

MichaelBanck

So far so good, but there's too many wasps and not enough screens showing 'Hackers'

ChrisLamb

More coffee during DebCamp, perhaps? Room names are very unwise but understand they are inherited from the venue. Very little to complain given obvious constraints. Thanks to all.

urbec

Great, that debcamp is back.
It's not only important for collaboration, sprints and setup,
but also for 'mentally setup'
and creation of the special kind of spirit debconf has - such things need time.

It was a good idea to offer bigger t-shirt sizes than 2X
(beside my sillyness of wearing crazy sizes, european 2X just would haven't been big enough)

cheese & wine location was too small for that many people (though better as in 11)

Morning breefings are too early and to close to starting of the first talks
(no time for video people to prepare in other rooms)

The only free option for the day trip was not accessible
and it was "self organized", making it an only half official option.

josch

It was awesome that the cheese&wine bof had a vegan section and gluten free crackers! Maybe there could also be a dedicated section/table for alcohol free beverages? We only saw some non-alcohols mixed with the alcohol bottels (Thank you so much Ian Campbell for that pear juice!!!). It could of course also be that there was a non-alcohol table and we just missed it because there were so many people around :)

madduck

• Earlier reimbursements as attendees need the cash before more than after the conference.
• Single, well-defined and dependable communication channel for orga announcements
• (Some) free afternoons would be useful, it became way to hard to find spaaace for sports and other stuff people want to do.
  • Maybe this relates to the idea of having less scheduled talks (stronger selection by quality and relevance) and more unconference spaaace?
• Better handling of sponsored food, e.g. include in corp rego and also plan for speakers, sponsors, etc.
• More committals on registration, maybe require a small payment etc.
• Crowd-sourcing beer prices etc. — we won't always have anonymous drinks sponsors, but why not ask attendees who want to contribute a certain amount to help us lower prices and make things more affordable from people from lower-income countries.
• Offer banner/flyer-printing for sponsors
• A single official source of information, e.g. an RSS feed for everything

highvoltage

Only my second debconf, but I enjoyed it a tremendously and got a lot of value from it. I think it's great that it's more kid-friendly and think there are some ways we can make it more so. I appreciate all the work that went into keeping announcements short and not too frequent, but I think more work could go in to improving that and I'm happy to get involved. Thanks to the orga team you did a great job!

kayhayen

Being relatively old school, I configure the WLAN only manually, and to select an SSID, I did "iwlist wlan scanning" and it said:

Failed to read scan data : Argument list too long

This defeated me in getting the SSID name. But probably shows that the number of access points is very sufficient. Later I could see that these are pretty much all your access points. And I will have to report a bug against wireless-tools now.

pollo

I do eat meat, but I do it on the rare occasions where I eat with my parents and they insist on having big fat steaks. Not knowing what to expect, I chose the "I'll eat whatever provided" option - and I'm pretty glad I did. I'm not sure I'd have been very happy with the food being a true vegetarian, even less being vegan.

I guess this is Germany and Germans eat a lot of meat and cheese, but it would be great to have a more diverse menu for the next DebConf.

But apart from this dietary ramble, woot DebConf. It's nice.

Joachim Breitner

I really like the lightning talk format, but still would like to see in advance what topics to expect, both when planning my attendance and when deciding whether I want to give one myself. Why not have a wiki page where people register themselves?

Myon

When the schedule was prepared, I wasn't aware of the open weekend so I accepted our "Debian HA Maintainers" BoF scheduled on the first Saturday. In the end that didn't work out because the room was full (good!) of mostly users who had a very different expectation from seeing a small handful of hackers discussing internal plans for packaging timelines. I think in the end everyone was pretty much disappointed from this session. The remaining 99% of DebConf are just great!

MarinaCiocea

Congratulation on organizing DebConf! This is my first DebConf and I think it's a great event, I really enjoyed it so far. Here are some suggestions for improvement:

• conference dinner: I think it would have been a good idea to tell participants that the dinner will be outside. I didn't dress properly for staying outside and I got cold. But other than that, good job on organizing the dinner! The food was very good and the waiting time very low.
• wireless: The wireless signal is very weak in the hostel room (I stay almost at the end of the corridor). It would be nice to have good wireless in the room as well to be able to work in the mornings/evenings.
• lightning talks: I really enjoyed the lighting talks session, it was fun and interesting. I subscribe to Joachim Breitner's feedback, I would also like to see the topics in advance.

hvhaugwitz

• badge:
  • add key signing index number (e.g. '#100')
  • add language codes (e.g. 'en de fr ar') for spoken languages
• place some monitors at central locations showing https://summit.debconf.org/upcoming and a live ticker with current announcements
• registration:
  • add feature to register for selected days (e.g. open weekend and day trip)
  • add day trip sign up to registration form (if needed)
  • add feature to register accompanying person (spouse/children) with one alioth account

chrysn

• More information on badges, e.g. packages/areas of interest

valhalla

• User profile with QR-code

Björn

• Speed geeking, and more get-to-know-you games

Federico

• Popularity vote for ad-hoc events

kilobyte

The daytrip/Dilsberg involved over 3.5 hours of standing and waiting: boat->buses, buses->tour, tour->buses. Could we please have a tighter schedule the next time?

fha

Has been a very inspiring and productive DebConf for me. I particularly appreciate the mixture of outstanding keynote speakers, the diversity of topics, the deliberately long break times for talking, socializing etc., the possibility to organize additional things ad-hoc. The venue was great,

In retrospective, things which should be kept in mind for the future:

• The location for the Cheese And Wine Party was suboptimal: too dense, too loud for 500 people (but that was of course to the the weather and the venue).
• The option to self-organize the excursion hike is convenient in such an interesting region, but that also reduced the chance to spend a day with people you don't know yet. Maybe three more official options would have resolved that while still leaving the freedom to do something privately.

noel

great debconf! One little point might be improved is the audio mixer/person training. In alot of talks there were delays and waitings for opening the microphones.

chrysn

• language tags on badges (sorted on preference) would be an enhancement i'd like to see.
• it's nice how kids friendly debconf is.

thanks for organising this!

deki

DebConf15 was the first DebConf I attended, and it was really amazing! I was surprised by the very good connectivity/availability of Wifi and power, and it was always possible to find a sitting spot. Having a beergarden and nearby raccoons was awesome, too!

In some talks I had the impression that they were cut off too harshly. A bit more buffer for more questions would be good. And while the t-shirts are very nice, I would prefer them without having so many sponsors listed on the back. I would rather wear it without advertising for them constantly.

CordBeermann

This was my first DebConf. I attended it including DebCamp, so I were on site for 13days. It was a great experience on a great site with a great organisation. I have a suggestion for the next DebConf: There should have been a key signing party. I know that there were far too many people on the Signing-Keyring, but that only shows how important this is for many members of the project. Maybe there should have been many organized Keysigningparties with a useful number of attendees. They could have been split by one of the random numbers on the nametag, or by splitting by the rank in the Keyring, so lower ranks would get a cross-sign by higher ranks.

Anibal Monsalve Salazar

For the keysignings, we tried CordBeermann's suggestions above in previous DebConfs. A KSP with 250 people takes many, many hours and most likely there is not an opportunity to engage in a meaningful conversation with each participant in the KSP. Daniel Kahn Gillmor and myself tried to encourage people to meet each other and have a conversation and maybe do a keysigning.

DLange

All in all a great DebConf with wonderful attendees and inspiring sessions.

Paul Wise

A great DebConf, pretty much perfect.

Some things that would be nice for future years:

• Audio recordings for the BoFs
• Better remote participation options
• Breakfast food variation

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl

Really great DebConf, especially with regard to arriving as a family! I was also impressed by the professionalism of everything around it (including gadgets in the conference bag).

However, the dining rooms where in my humbly opinion often quite noisy... But I have no idea, how that could have been improved.

The only other idea for improvement I have: To attend via an official business trip from my employer, the schedule was published to late (or at least I didn't found it soon enough).

Solveig

I really enjoyed this DebConf. I loved that there were so many different people, I was glad to see friends again and glad to meet new great people (particularly kids!) :)

I'm impressed at german speaker's attention to switch to english as soon as a non-native joined.

Enrico's Comedy was great. So was the birthday cake(s). Thank you Mario for the beautiful juggling. Thank you everyone that came with good things for the cheese and wine party (especially you, japanese guy with plum alcohol!).

The organization was amazing. Kudos to all of you!

zlatan

Cons:

• day trip could be better organized (museum tour just had too much time)
• Dinner should be done in closed restaurants with option to have it outside if weather is good
• Also for dinner stuff should get some tips on organization to avoid chaos :)

Pros:

• The semi-integration of hostel stuff
• Childcare
• Sport activities
• Outreach program
• Karaoke, disco nights
• Invited speakers (more non-Debian specific speakers so we can learn more about other projects and communities)

Suggestions:

• More outreach
• Full integration of stuff into community during the conference (and later if they wish)
• More free time during the day (we can have some talks later at night (8-10 pm) to get this time)
• More vocal call for childcare from now on
• Major announcements should be written on some major white board in central place where everyone will see it
• More stand-up comedies (it is good for community health)
• Better integration of participants into organization (orga teams do their job all the time but during DebConf there should be call to all to participate in some activities so it gets easier for orga team and also people with good ideas can express themselves)
• Longer merchandise stands (maybe even longer job fair stands in dedicated room for that)
• Maybe other community/project Outreach: Fedora, Ubuntu, openSuse etc
• More skillshare and team maintenance BoFs
• More hardware hacking and hardware gifting
• Maybe also start thinking about "Vendor team" which DPL would delegate to start more active talk with vendors about open sourcing their firmware, drivers and similar (DebConf would be perfect to do that activity)
• more live talks about modernizing of Debian infrastructure to make it easier to contribute to Debian
• More beer!

dkg

I was really happy with debconf15. In particular, the active inclusion of childcare helped us have a wider age range present, and helped to ensure that debconf and parenting do not have to be mutually-exclusive lifestyle choices. The "hallway track" continues to be an important part of the conference for me, and I really value the chances I had to sit with different groups of people and have a lot of narrowly-focused and intense conversations about debian, free software, and the future. Those discussions brought up lots of new ideas and ways we might try to fix long-standing problems.

Getting sick in the middle of the conference was the biggest downside for me, but i don't know if there are ways to avoid that when a large group of people come together from all over the place, pool contagions, and don't get enough sleep. :/ People were kind to me while i was feeling sickly, though.

The Lightning Talks were excellent, and I would love to see even more of them. I wonder if it's possible to have "if you were to give a lightning talk, what would it be on?" as a question as part of the registration process, to try to encourage even more participation. The conference gets better when everyone involved feels they're a contributing member, and i think lightning talks can help get people started with presenting their ideas in public.

Elbrus

I missed the first announcement of the hash of the key-signing document. I recommend it is announced multiple times on the first couple of days. Maybe even beam it every day on the general announcements on every slide or so for other late-comers. Now it took me a while to pick up keysigning.

SteveMcIntyre

Excellent conference experience as always, with great time to work and talk with others.

Things that went very well:

• The venue was awesome, much better than I expected up front!
• Great set of keynote talks
• Wonderful job with childcare, letting people turn up who otherwise couldn't have
• Stunning work by the video team again, to get videos up on the net so quickly

Things that went less well for me:

• Confirmation of room availability was not early enough for me, so I ended up staying elsewhere
• Talk acceptance and scheduling could have been made much clearer

Laura Arjona

Some feedback as a non attendant:

• There is a link to DebConf15 photos here in the wiki, but it points to a folder with files, no thumbnails or way to see the photos without downloading all of them first.

• Audio in BoF and non recorded sessions (if everybody in the room agrees) would be nice. I read Daniel Pocock's http://danielpocock.com/recording-live-events-like-a-pro-part-one-audio and it looks something that can be achieved in next debconfs

• First time the Outreach Sponsoring is made, it would be nice to know how many people have been contacted to apply, how many people actually applied, and how many people were accepted.

• Idea: give a mobile camera to attendants so they self-record themselves saying anything about DebConf, interviewing other people, etc. This recording can be shown in some screen at the evening and following day, and uploaded as "attendants impressions of DebConf-day-n". It can be useful to show prospective attendants the "human side" of the conference and foster people's attendance and participation in DebConf.

• We need a bit more live coverage of DebConf during DebConf.

• It would be useful to gather feedback from the children attending DebConf (not only from their parents).

Thank you very much to everybody involved in the organization.