[EuroPython] while it's fresh

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 13 Jun 2004 11:18:45 +0200, Martijn Faassen writes:
>Hi there,
>
>I really enjoyed the conference a lot. There was a mix of very 
>interesting people, plenty of interesting talks, good facilities. 
>Attendee count is still rising. Overall it's in the steady line of 
>improvement EuroPython has seen from the beginning. Price of 
>accomodation was nice and low and it was a lot of fun having lots of 
>people staying in the same complex. The conference dinner was impressive.
>
>The post conference sprint area was wonderful; I really enjoyed thursday 
>and friday.
>
>It's however difficult to talk about the things that went well very 
>long, so while it's still fresh in my mind, I'll complain about some 
>things that could be improved. Please take it as constructive criticism; 
>I think the conference was a resounding success but we can make it even 
>better.
>
>   * room reservation needs to be made more flexible somehow. I think 
>many people had to extend their stay forward or backwards into time, and 
>handling this caused a lot of overhead for the organizers as well.

I got the bulk of this problem, and I already have a solution in the works.

>
>   * rooms should have had clear numbers from the beginning. The 
>letter->number mapping is bad usability, and a bug in it sent me off to 
>the wrong room. I didn't understand why room numbers got shuffled again 
>after day 1. Is this because the program would otherwise unfairly 
>allocate the larger rooms to the same track multiple times? If so, we 
>need to make sure the program does the right shuffling itself.

This we can only do if we can collect info on where people are going to
attend before they get to the conference.  Our problem was that we
were _wrong_ when we guessed which tracks were to be the most popular,
and we needed to give the poor crowded Zope people a larger room.
We still had crowding problems.

>
>   * lunch break was too short/crowded. Especially on day 1 when nobody 
>knew what to do yet, there was an enormous queue. On later days we 
>avoided this mostly by leaving for lunch early or later, but we didn't 
>know this in advance. As a track chair I had trouble making it in time 
>on day 1 as I just came out of a talk and had to go into the talk after 
>lunch directly after. People were trickling back 10 minutes after the 
>talks had officially already started. I appreciated lunch being so 
>nearby, but we need to figure out a better way to manage these for next 
>year. Perhaps a simple warning would've done the trick.

Maybe.  Expecting 2 or 3 walk-ins, as happened in Charleroi, and getting
25 or so on Monday also stressed the system.

>
>   * we didn't really mind standing up, but some rooms didn't have 
>enough chairs available to host a panel discussion.

There were chairs you could have used all over the closed restaurant downstairs.
Maybe we need to do something so that track chairs and others know that they
are encouraged to make such alterations?

>
>   * I do not know what can be done, but the beamers were extremely 
>fickle, even more so than usual. I tested a presentation monday morning 
>on the beamer, saw it worked, and then when the time came my laptop was 
>needed for the actual presentation the resolution was all off. At two 
>instances during my track alone the beamer could basically not be made 
>to work at all. I witnessed several other talks with beamer problems.

Yes.  This was, I think the greatest failing ...

>
>   * Due to a bizarre mistake, I got a baby pink conference tshirt for 
>some reason. I think next year we need more quality control over tshirt 
>colors. :)

hee hee.

>
>Regards,
>
>Martijn