Post event thoughts

bad:

• ~80 people grabbed an eventbrite ticket.
  • of those people, i think only about 25 showed up. the reasons might be:
    • it was free,
      • it would be possible to charge say $5 and put it towards food. or on the other hand charge $5 and just give it away to a charity, and still just get sponsorship.
      • could also do staged ticket releases
      • or $5/$10 deposit that is forfeited if you don’t turn up
    • it started at 9:30am on a saturday,
    • not enough agenda information was provided,
    • too much information was provided,
    • another event was running at the same time (thesis boot camp - GovCampAU), or
    • some other reason?
    • hard to convince scientists of the value of this
• however, the venue probably would've only supported about 60 people, and we had about 45. so that was fine.
• as a result, too many pizzas were ordered. might be nice to think of ways to mitigate this problem at future events by having a clear way to donate any unused food to some place, if appropriate. or purchase more discrete items that can be taken away (say sandwiches).
• perhaps the "10 minutes do a thing, 50 minutes everyone try and do that thing" isn't a great way of teaching. at least, i could've rehearsed that.
• i forgot to ask any "hackers" if they wanted to talk about a thing. i think they would've mentioned it to me had they wanted to. i forgot because we ended up having an hour of talks at the end, and i felt it was going on for too long, so it slipped my mind.
• i'm not sure everyone signed up for all the things i wanted them to. this is probably okay, but maybe there could've been a more direct action they needed to perform, in order to motivate that. on the other hand, they can do what they want.
  • I had the impression that some people weren't very familiar with ipython/interactive programming in general, perhaps showing off ipython first would help motivate "ipython in the cloud" a bit better?
• while people seemed to know enough about git to use it, no-one really seemed interested in learning the more advanced things you could do, which surprised me a bit.
  • might've helped to have some motivation to create submodules, github pages, and branches.
  • Adding a "why" to each feature introduction may help here based on questions from attendees, i.e., branches allow you to try new things without risk of breaking your code - and give live examples in the wild
• snack organisation was probably left a little too late.
• perhaps two or three mc's would've been a good idea, but i also realised this too late.
• probably some sort of thankyou item for the volunteers and speakers would be a good idea, i thought about this but only too late.

good/neutral:

• in the end there was a ratio of about 1:1 between volunteers and attendee's. so maybe there is a bigger demand in a more "expert" session, where we just sit around and do programming, or talk about cool projects.
• having such a ratio meant people got a lot of detailed help from one person. i think this was useful.
• talks from the community on their own projects was well received.
• post-event beers were awesome.
• there was no effort to make a community in any sense. i'm not sure if we should or shouldn't. it might be nice to have a bunch of people who care about science stuff doing things. but on the other hand, we can just do that already, by contacting people. i'm not sure.