Foundation/Local Chapters/United States/Minutes-2016-08-09

SOTM US Post Mortem

09 AUGUST 2016 / 4:30 PM

Attendees

Alyssa Wright, Martijn Van Exel , Ian Dees, Drishtie Patel, Joel Masselink, Chase Stephens, Natalie Pitcher, Clifford Snow

Notes

Program

• Better work flow. Next year figure out a way to know before hand what tools we use to support the time frames. ie. e-mail chimps, forms, spreadsheets.
• We should be more vigilant about not recording. Complaints about not recording video.
• Technical Talks - In regards to complaints about people wanting more technical talks
• Maybe have tags to communicate which talks were more technical
• Mixed reviews from feedback
• Scheduling - Integrate Birds of Feather into other program communication, so more people can easily get info and
• Have more people not submitting talks be on the selection committee. Have more unbiased people on the

Volunteers

• Excellent volunteers
• We had 33 sign up. A few didn’t show up so it was tough re-adjusting schedules real time.
• If we had 41 it would have been enough.
• Start earlier finding and recruiting volunteers
• Natalie’s list with more on Github
• Volunteers didn’t know what their roles were
• Maybe have volunteers come earlier and have a training in person
• Have a contact person for volunteers should check in with and get info from throughout the conference
• Send out a Thank-you e-mail and an anonymous survey to get feedback from all volunteers
• Volunteer shifts should overlap a little bit (instead of 9-10 and 10-11 it should be 9-10:15 and 10-11:15) and the volunteers should have the expectation that they will be training their replacement with their "on the ground" takeaways
• Volunteers need to give their cell phone numbers when signing up, and that needs to be on the printed volunteer sheet so supervisors or other volunteers can call missing volunteers
• The exact location of where a volunteer checks in needs to be made clear (registration desk)

Venue

• People did not like the 3 minutes walk from building. Have more time built in for that.
• Dorm rooms were popular
• Food lines were a bit long
• Wi-fi was not good
• We had a few issues with AV. The video recording group equipment clashed with the University AV.

Ticketing

• Only 1 taker for child care. Should we do this next time?
• Eventbrite was good.
• Double counting issue due to the way eventbrite was set up.
• Final count 477 unique names (chase copy pasted names from each e-mail)

Communication

• We should be coming up with a general overview of the program including social events and workshops so people are aware of the dates before planning their travel
• Github was not the best option for communication.
• If we had used Github it in a better way it could have worked better
• Too many methods to communicate made things confusing. E-mail, slack, github, trello, google docs
• Figure out a more efficient way to share and communicate info