Archive:FUDCon:Tempe 2011 retrospective

This is a page for plopping your thoughts about what good things were good, what things could be improved, and other suggestions in general. A few weeks post-FUDCon these should be reviewed and turned into additional points to be listed in FUDCon organization process.

Good

• We had lots of driving help with both big and little vehicles. This helped out quite a bit with people needing to haul around food, ice, humans who needed to do logistics planning, etc.
• Spot preprinting barcamp pitches on the wiki page onto sheets for the pitch sessions as well as for signage on classrooms worked out really well.
• Excellent information and assistance to non-American attendees. Nobody was lost.
• Plenty of space for all activities and all appropriate for maximum comfort.

Not so good

• Read quite a few blogs commenting on lack of organization around hackfests; no opportunity to pitch, didn't know what was going on where, etc.
  • PROPOSAL: In the future, follow lightning talks or whatever the last technical session is with a plenary session where people announce their hackfests.
• The organizers went to great lengths at Tempe to work with the host's ISP on wireless, and opening the appropriate ports. Unfortunately some of the requests were not heeded. We have a *lot* of latitude to do things through SSH, and future FUDCons should provide more technical guidance in advance showing people, in cookbook approach, how to set up their systems for maximum flexibility (tunneling, using IRC proxies, etc.).

Suggestions

Regarding the hauling around of drinks and ice

• If we do things again in a space where we are able to supply soda / adult beverages / snacks, whether that is in the hotel in the evenings, workspace during daytimes, or at FUDPub - buy or rent a hand truck.
• Whoever the person is to have all the drinks and ice in their room - get a room on the first floor, near an exit door, and if it is alcohol, not near the front desk but rather another door. Our hotel (a major chain) had rules regarding the amounts of alcohol we could have in rooms, but was nice enough to also apply the "see no evil" rule and tell us that taking it through another door would be in our best interest.
• Whoever the person is to have all the drinks and ice in their room - if there is a room size upgrade available, they should be eligible to get it - or alternately, rent a separate room altogether for storage of this stuff.

Other suggestions

• If we pre-print barcamp pitches and/or hackfest pitches - let's do it on a light-colored background for ease of making tally marks.
• Please have live audio either available via stream or via fedora talk as this will improve the ability of remote attendees to participate.
• Having web pages available with background material and goals for talks and working sessions available before the start of fudcon will also help remote participation.
• Feedback through IRC didn't work very well because the transcribers were also tasked with this (where there were transcribers) and doing both tasks at once didn't seem to work well. Ideally there would be two people preassigned to each session, one to provide live transcripts for people that can't use an audio feed and another to watch for comments from remote participants.
• We might want to have walkie-talkies or some other instant communication between organizers, such as for BarCamp setup. That would help everyone stay on schedule and eliminate the need to run back and forth to see (for example) when it's time to send people to voting.