DrupalCamp NJ 2013 Camp feedback and lessions learned

On Feb 2, 2013 we had about 223 people attend out of 246 registered. Most of them came in at the beginning of the day, though a few more arrived through early afternoon.

Overall, we felt like it was a good success. Most of the presenters have posted their slides, and we captured audio recordings of all sessions.

Below is a summary from lunch and meeting today to review evaluations and our experience as organizers:

We got 47 responses on the feedback form.

Rate the camp overall
Excellent 27
Very good 17
Acceptable 1
Needs improvement 2

Reading through the responses and discussing our experience we came up with the following points to consider for next year:

Ideas for improvement:

• Make sure to pick up the Convocation Room key!
• Ask Media Services to bring booth room key for 101 when doing A/V training
• Recruit one or more volunteers to take and post photos
• don't schedule a BoF on the Convocation room the hour before lunch, since lunch setup disrupts it
• consider like a dozen volunteer tickets so we have people committed each for a couple hours to desk, lunch, etc
• Make sure the room monitors have clearer instructions to flag time to the speakers, and try to pass mic or get the speaker to repeat questions
• reserve and put on map a couple rooms as "coder lounge" and "conversation room" (or networking room?)
• On session submission add a field for suggested audience pre-requisites
• On the session submission add a field for what the audience should get out of the session (like Drupalcon Portland)
• Encourage presenters to include demos or at least screen shots rather than too many textual slides

Other thoughts about changing/improving the after-party:

• Have it in the Convocation room (bring in beer and food) - might be loud, no change of scene, we have to clean up
• Have it at Triumph - much farther to walk, much hihgher cost
• Use the Ivy nn again but pay for ~2 hours of exclusivity
• Use Campus Club and bring in beer/food - we have to clean up, somewhat farther to walk
• rent a closer eating club - unknown cost?

Important things to repeat:

• Checking projectors and screens in every room was key to avoiding disaster this year - make sure to do it again

It was a wonderful camp. Thank you for all of your work!
It would be nice if all code examples (configuration file examples included) that were used in the sessions could be made available on GitHub where applicable. The ability to easily clone or fork examples would make it easier for people to take ideas and run with them.