[Users] Following Up on LinuxCon Japan Workshop

[Mike Burns]

Hi Leslie,

On Wed, 2012-06-13 at 15:14 -0700, Leslie Hawthorn wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I'd like to collect feedback from everyone on last week's oVirt workshop 
> at LinuxCon Japan. [0] Please reply back with comments by close of 
> business this Friday, 15 June.
> 
> Once we have gathered feedback on list, I'll capture it on the oVirt 
> wiki. We can then use what we've learned to help construct the agenda 
> and other plans for other upcoming oVirt workshops at LinuxCons. [1]
> 
> If you know that you would like to volunteer as an instructor for future 
> workshops or would like to suggest alternate content for the workshop, 
> please include that in your feedback.
> 
> - Course Material
> What sessions were most well received? Which ones require improvement? 
> Any additional sessions we'd suggest?

All of the sessions seemed to be well received.  I don't know that any
need blatant improvement, though they could probably all take a bit of
slide updates.  The ovirt-node presentation was especially out of date
(my fault) with it's screenshots.  

> 
> - Audience Participation
> How many attendees? How did the Q&A periods go? Would we like to prepare 
> a post-event attendee survey? (I recommend we do the survey and can 
> prepare some questions for the group if that's useful.)

There were probably between 25-35 people through the course of the day
for all the presentations.  

There wasn't really a lot of time set aside for Q&A aside from a few
minutes at the end of each presentation and the breaks in between
presentations.  During those times, there generally were people asking
questions.

I think we should prepare the survey in advance of the next workshop and
ask people to fill it out during the workshop, rather than coming back a
couple weeks after the fact.  We didn't really collect names of the
people in attendance and I expect that a fair number of people
registered attended the Gluster Conference.

> 
> - Developer/user traction resulting from engaging at workshop
> Did this workshop help us to gain new developers or users? Reinforce 
> relationships with existing community members?

Only time will really tell here.  People definitely seemed interested
and there were a couple people already downloading and installing the
bits during the workshop.  I got the impression that most of the people
there were more corporate focused -- Hitachi and Fujitsu were both well
represented.  They're from companies that have previously expressed
interest in the project.  

> 
> - Promotion of the event, both before and after
> What could be done to more effectively promote the event prior to the 
> workshops? Videos and slides from the workshop should be posted on the 
> LC Japan site tomorrow; what action would the community like to take to 
> promote this content?

Not really my area of expertise -- promoting.  Probably better to get
information out there earlier that the workshop is happening.  It seemed
to be a bit of a fire drill getting things together for this workshop
since it was only about a month before that we decided to run it.
Future workshops shouldn't be as big a deal.

Probably an email announcement to users@ with a link to the
presentations/videos is the right next step.
> 
> - A/V and Room Set up
> Did the seating arrangements work well for the workshop format? Did the 
> A/V work well, including the videotaping process?

Our room was setup with 5 round tables seating 10 people each.  I'm not
sure that it was really the right layout.  I expected either rows of
chairs or long tables with chairs all facing the presentation screen.

A/V worked seamlessly.  It was all setup already when we arrived.  

> 
> - Food and beverage
> Did the catered in lunch help to keep the flow of the workshop 
> productive? Was the food of good quality and in keeping with the needs 
> of attendee dietary constraints?

I had no issues with the food.  People seemed to take the opportunity
more to step out and take a break, rather than sit and continue
discussing.  

> 
> - Give aways
> We did not produce attendee gifts for the oVirt workshop. Thoughts on 
> whether this would be a welcome addition in the future? Suggestions for 
> type of gift also welcome.

It would have been nice to have some sort of SWAG to give away, whether
just fancy handouts or stickers.  It would be even better if we could
have some sort of appliance with ovirt pre-installed and configured on a
usb stick as well, but that's probably a year or 2 down the road.

> 
> - Any other feedback

It's probably better if there are people from a wider range of the
sub-projects than we had in Japan.  I think that between Barak and I, we
managed to cover the majority of the project, but I think it would be
better to have someone from each major subproject there.  

I expect that either myself or someone from the Node team will be
attending at least LinuxCon NA, LinuxCon Europe and the NetApp
workshops.  We'll certainly handle the Node presentation for each of
these workshops.

Mike

> 
> If it is preferable to discuss this feedback real-time, I will ask Mike 
> Burns to give us more time for this topic during next week's oVirt IRC 
> meeting.
> 
> [0] - 
> https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-japan/ovirt-gluster-workshops
> [1] - http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/OVirt_Global_Workshops
> 
> Cheers,
> LH
>