What didn't work in Chicago (non-personal please)

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robbiethegeek's picture

The things that didn't work out in Chicago, were ....

Please post below and start talking about the things we all didn't l liked about Chicago, lets do this in a non-personal way. No flame bait or targetted attacks please everyone who worked on the convention should be thanked this is just things that could have been done differently

Comments

Cell Phones / Wifi / Networking

crimsondryad's picture

Some things that didn't work so great:

1) Cell phones for everyone seemed to go dead because we couldn't get service, especially on the lower levels

2) Maybe I just missed it, but I had to ask around before I figured out what the Wifi access was.

3) The coder lounge wasn't very loungy. With the rows all facing forward, it was hard to get people who didn't know each other to say hi and collaborate. Maybe round tables next time? Sometimes us geeks have a hard time breaking the ice...making people sit next to each other and talk might force us to meet more people. :) Or maybe a Drupal speed-dating thing where you talk to someone for 5 minutes and then move to the next person.

Overall Drupalcon was an awesome experience, I hope I can make it next year.

A really good idea

vuzzbox's picture

Or maybe a Drupal speed-dating thing where you talk to someone for 5 minutes and then move to the next person.

This is a fine idea, indeed. Give yourself a star. I could see having this for one or two hours on each day or evening of the conference.

Like the speed-dating idea

dkingofpa's picture

Maybe call it speed-meeting or speed-networking. I was in Chicago by myself and it felt difficult to break in to the company groups or other drupal cliques.

Completely agree with #2. I

davidhernandez's picture

Completely agree with #2. I had to keep asking around for the password.

Despite the food being good

nikkiana's picture

Despite the food being good for us meat eaters, I kept hearing complaints from my vegan friends over the utter lack of protein in the options they were given. If food's going to be provided, there needs to be better oversight on what's being served for folks with dietary restrictions.

Since I spent most of my time bouncing between the lobby and the sponsors floor, it didn't even occur to me to go upstairs to the sessions floor. I think I went up there maybe twice?

While the session area on the sponsor floor was conceptually a good idea, in actuality, it didn't work. Vendors that were in the center where the session area was had a hard time giving demos and talking to people because the amplified voice of the speaker was overpowering them and the speakers were hard to understand because of the din of the crowd. It was a sound nightmare.

The time of the keynote speeches didn't work for me. Maybe it's just because I'm not a morning person and I'm unwilling to compromise my morning sleep, but I liked how the keynotes were at 1:30 in SF a whole lot better.

not good

kbell's picture

I agree about the coder lounges not being conducive to any kind of interaction or collaboration - no "loungey" or comfortable vibe, so maybe if we could have a mix of environments - something more social, but also a place that's just good to sit down and work as well? I can see a need for both.

I love the speed-dating idea, especially useful organized around:
1. freelancers and potential clients
2. job-seekers and potential employers
3. module maintainers and coders who want to become involved with contributing

I am personally a night owl as well, but I'm not sure having sessions begin later in the day really works either for the most efficient use of folks' time, though certainly I suppose moving the keynotes to later but still starting in the morning would also work.

I was disappointed that Wednesday had the most desirable intermediate/advanced sessions double- (or triple- or quadruple-) booked. I believe better attention should be paid to getting the scheduling right, so there are intermediate and advanced topics spread over all the conference days - even the first one.

On a related topic, most of the advanced sessions didn't make the cut, which was very disappointing. The problem here is that because of the huge groundswell of interest and adoption by newbies and business-folk, the more advanced community members are by definition unavoidably outnumbered, as evidenced by all the advanced sessions that didn't make the cut. Session selection should not ONLY be about gross numbers, but about meeting needs relative to the Community demographics.

To that end, I have a suggestion: for those of us on the more advanced end of things, attending sessions is not as compelling as the Core Conversations. I suggest that instead of having Core Conversations all day every day, we have Core Conversations for 2 days, and the 3rd day an all-day unconference on advanced topics only, maybe on a couple of tracks (themeing/development). OR perhaps an "advanced hands-on intensive" track for people wanting to move from "intermediate" to "advanced". This would all, of course, be alongside the normal conference sessions, just replacing the Core Conversation track as it was done in Chicago.

The point would be to provide an integrated, continuous experience for those who desire it, starting with 2 days of discussion, 1 day of advanced training (which might have a track training folks in the Issue Queue, rolling patches, contributing and maintaining modules, etc), and a final day of Community contribution - the post-conference Code Sprint.

We could implement the "OK Cupid" matchmaking approach to match maintainers with willing volunteers, and they could sit in a room with experienced contributors and actually accomplish something - demystify the contribution process and achieve a concrete goal. The idea would be that everyone who wanted to could attend DrupalCon and expect to leave having actively contributed to drupal.org or a contrib module.

Lastly, the lack of WiFi and Cell reliability, access and bandwidth was truly disastrous - I think we would want to make absolutely certain that doesn't happen at a NYC DrupaCon.

--Kelly Bell
Gotham City Drupal
twitter: @kbell | @gothamdrupal
http://drupal.org/user/293443

Agreed on the advanced sessions

crimsondryad's picture

I wanted to hit a lot of sessions and several times picking one was tough because the interesting stuff was all at the same time.

I really like the idea of having a group of volunteers work with a module maintainer to actually accomplish something. We did something similar in a training class we had about a month ago and I think people were a lot more engaged because they didn't think it was some worthless "hello world" type example. And having someone who knows what they're doing to walk you through makes hooks and the like a bit less intimidating.

The Git sessions were very cool, hopefully letting people branch and set up their own sandboxes would help facilitate the volunteers in the room working together thing. Then each person could work on a bug in the queue, have the maintainer right there for questions, and get to pull down code between commits so everyone wouldn't step on each other's toes.

I considered staying for the code sprints, but while I've been project managing several large Drupal projects, I haven't had time to actually dev much. I was apprehensive about being in a room with a bunch of uber devs looking at me like I was clueless and / or slowing down the sprint ( we really really need those contrib modules ported to D7 LOL ).

Thoughts from a marketing person

amycham's picture

As someone who is fully business-side now, I spent almost all of my time in the expo hall. It wasn't until Wednesday afternoon that I accidentally got off the elevator on the ballroom floor and realized that it was the first time I had been in the session hall.

There were a lot of people I expected to see, but never did, because of this separation. Definitely made me miss how everyone mixed at DC where the exhibitor spots were in the thick of things. Not sure what can be done about that given the scale DrupalCon has reached, but it made me a little sad.

I'll second the comment regarding the day stage in the exhibitor area. It was hard for both exhibitors and speakers--there were people who came by our booth but declined to talk for more than a minute or two so as not to be rude to the presenters. And I certainly don't envy the presenters trying to talk over the hall noise.

Likewise for cell reception. Anyone who couldn't do wifi on their phone would be out of luck trying to stay connected with their team, twitter, groupme's, etc.

One other thing that came up...I don't know if anyone else had this problem (or considered it a problem), but we were disappointed that two of our team members had sessions at the same time. Made it tricky to do photos, moral support, etc. Definitely not a simple thing to organize all those sessions and speakers, but if possible would be nice to avoid double-booking speakers from the same company.


Amy C. Cham
Twitter: amycham

I really hated that

davidhernandez's picture

I really hated that information wasn't organized well. I had the handbook, which had sessions but not full descriptions. The android app had session descriptions, but not BoFs. BoFs were on the website. I had to constantly go back and forth between each. If the book at least had session descriptions, that would have been ok.

I also hated the room names. Obviously not the organizers fault, but I don't know how many times I wondered around trying to find a room only to realize I was in completely the wrong place. How hard is it to just number rooms.

issues with Drupalcon Chicago

joebachana's picture
  1. Food was really not good, particularly for vegetarians/vegans
  2. Sponsorship area was disembodied from session area. all sessions should be gotten to through the sponsor exhibit area at any drupalcon
  3. the venue was way too distributed - I can't believe that I missed out on seeing people that I've seen at every other Drupalcon in the past
  4. +1 davidhernandez on information flow, particularly on the session descriptions
  5. Voting on sessions still seems a bit less empirically accurate way of picking the best sessions
  6. needs to be ongoing training sessions through the whole of Drupalcon
  7. needs to be ongoing Drupal for business owners sessions, albeit the CXO summit was a good start the day prior from what I heard from a colleague

On the ++ side, George did a great job coordinating the most ambitious Drupalcons to date, so I don't want to minimize his herculean efforts

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com