I was looking around at the scale site for a place to add comments about the event. I found none, so I decided to post on the scale list.
Anyway, I think it would be great, if there was a way for people to add their constructive criticism about the 2008 event. Since I may be kicking off the start of a potentially interesting post, I might as well add my recommendations.
1. The only major problem I had was with name-tag lanyards. Please, please, please make the font bigger and print the names on both sides. I had a real hard time reading people's names, even on the rare instances where the name-tag was facing the correct direction. Yes I wear glasses, but had broken them before the event. I'm sure many people were wondering why I was using my face as an OCR scanner on their name-tag. If you need more ink and paper to do this, I will donate $200.
2. The printed schedule was missing the raffle event/party for Saturday(I think).
Other than that, and any venue related problems, it was excellent. I'm looking forward to next year. And I'm sorry if this is the wrong list to post to.
Matt Jones wrote:
I was looking around at the scale site for a place to add comments about the event. I found none, so I decided to post on the scale list.
Anyway, I think it would be great, if there was a way for people to add their constructive criticism about the 2008 event. Since I may be kicking off the start of a potentially interesting post, I might as well add my recommendations.
Last year I pretty much ripped the SCALE guys a new one regarding how it could be improved - SCALE 5x was kind of a waste of time, and I told them exactly how I thought it was and how it could be improved. AFter a little understandable umbrage, they listened, and I am pleased to say that this year they knocked it out of the park. As I've told a few people "privately", while there was definitely room for improvement on a few things, they fixed every single one of my complaints. The seminars were highly technical but not too much so and I did not feel like I was trying to be sold anything, the registration line was short, the rooms were not crowded. This time it was not a waste of time and I don't feel like I wasted the registration fee.
The few suggestions for improvement that I had were not structural. One of my suggestions is a "linux in business" track, which consists of some training for techies to be better at business, and vice versa. I also think that having some way for businesspeople to be more involved *without* trying to market to us or sell us stuff might be cool. Like a talk "So you have a small business, what can linux do for you?", or "care and feeding of techies", or something like that. Drawing decisionmakers would be good for the seminar and for the expo floor - as long as we can do it in such a way that attracts them while still making it clear that they're on *our* turf this time - ie, bridge building goes both ways.
But that's really here nor there. Kudos for listening, and kudos for successfully fixing it. Keep it up and maybe I'll go next year. And maybe not, but it's certainly not anything you guys did.
--Russell
On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 10:57:34PM -0800, Matt Jones wrote:
- The only major problem I had was with name-tag lanyards. Please,
please, please make the font bigger and print the names on both sides. I had a real hard time reading people's names, even on the rare instances where the name-tag was facing the correct direction. Yes I wear glasses, but had broken them before the event. I'm sure many people were wondering why I was using my face as an OCR scanner on their name-tag. If you need more ink and paper to do this, I will donate $200.
There's only so much room on a 4x3 piece of paper. If an attendee's name is 8 letters, then it will come out nice and big. If the person's name is 30 letters, there's no much I can do other than shrinking the font.
- Lei
I was looking around at the scale site for a place to add comments about the event. I found none, so I decided to post on the scale list.
I was going to send an email to this list this week, so this is good timing.
The only thing that was a problem from my point of view was the badge scanning. That was simply hopeless, and almost comically so. It did provide a bit of levity and you would think that people won the lottery from everybody's reaction when the scanner actually did work. Even on Sunday when things were supposedly corrected, most badges didn't scan.
With that one hiccup, I thought the event was otherwise EXCELLENT. I told this to several SCALE volunteers that I saw in person, but let me go on record publicly saying that this was one of the more well-organized conferences I have ever participated in, bar none. This is all the more remarkable because it was organized by volunteers and not by a large, full-time staff.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the volunteers who made this happen. You did a wonderful job and I heard nothing but positive comments. (Well, between the "Why the *&@*! won't this badge scan??" comments. ;-) I know this was hard work, but you managed all the details and made it relatively painless for those of us who participated. We'll definitely be coming next year.
Cheers,
-- Dave
---- Dave Roberts Vice-President, Strategy Vyatta, Inc. Email: dave@vyatta.com Direct: 650-413-7248 Welcome to the dawn of open-source networking.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 09:11:39AM -0800, Dave Roberts wrote:
I was looking around at the scale site for a place to add comments about the event. I found none, so I decided to post on the scale list.
I was going to send an email to this list this week, so this is good timing.
The only thing that was a problem from my point of view was the badge scanning. That was simply hopeless, and almost comically so. It did provide a bit of levity and you would think that people won the lottery from everybody's reaction when the scanner actually did work. Even on Sunday when things were supposedly corrected, most badges didn't scan.
We'll definitely look into this issue and improve it for next year. The main problem was that the toner didn't stick well to the badge stock. We had 8 identical models of the same printer, yet only 3 did a decent job of printing. We gave a stack of extra badge stock to the printer vendor, perhaps they'll do a post-show analysis.
Then there's problems with lighting conditions and reflection from the plastic badge holder. We will do some research on this and try to get some other brands of scanners to try out. If anyone is an expert on this area, feel free to contact me with suggestions.
- Lei
One thing I noticed (I didn't hear complaints about it, but it kind irked me) was that last year, the back of the badges reminded attendees of the personal info that was contained in the barcode, but this year that wasn't true. I think it's important to remind people what person info they're giving away.
That said, I heard much of the "thank you" "this rocks" "this is the best conference ever" comments. Since I was introducing speakers, I heard it a lot from them, but I also had an attendee kindly insist on buying me a drink one night because I was staff, despite my protests. Every year I hear even more positive comments.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 12:24:03PM -0800, Phil Dibowitz wrote:
One thing I noticed (I didn't hear complaints about it, but it kind irked me) was that last year, the back of the badges reminded attendees of the personal info that was contained in the barcode, but this year that wasn't true. I think it's important to remind people what person info they're giving away.
The infromation was on the left side. It also doubled as a receipt. The badge stock just didn't fold to become a two-sided badge.
Lei Zhang wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 12:24:03PM -0800, Phil Dibowitz wrote:
One thing I noticed (I didn't hear complaints about it, but it kind irked me) was that last year, the back of the badges reminded attendees of the personal info that was contained in the barcode, but this year that wasn't true. I think it's important to remind people what person info they're giving away.
The infromation was on the left side. It also doubled as a receipt. The badge stock just didn't fold to become a two-sided badge.
Aha! It wasn't clear to me that's what that was. Good to know it was there.
BTW,
Since the talks were video'd this year - is whoever video'd them also going to be hosting them? If so, did they give an estimate of how long it will take to encode and post them?
79 *HOURS* of video to encode...going to take a while
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 11:48 PM, Phil Dibowitz phil@ipom.com wrote:
BTW,
Since the talks were video'd this year - is whoever video'd them also going to be hosting them? If so, did they give an estimate of how long it will take to encode and post them?
-- Phil Dibowitz phil@ipom.com Open Source software and tech docs Insanity Palace of Metallica http://www.phildev.net/ http://www.ipom.com/
"Never write it in C if you can do it in 'awk'; Never do it in 'awk' if 'sed' can handle it; Never use 'sed' when 'tr' can do the job; Never invoke 'tr' when 'cat' is sufficient; Avoid using 'cat' whenever possible" -- Taylor's Laws of Programming
Scale-planning mailing list Scale-planning@mail.socallinuxexpo.org http://mail.socallinuxexpo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scale-planning
Tom King wrote:
79 *HOURS* of video to encode...going to take a while
Yeah, I figured as much. I've never had to encode that much video, so I have no idea what the expected time to do it is. Hence, I asked. Weeks? A month? Months? By next SCALE? Just curious.
Hello people on the list,
I would like to express a few comments from a ".org" point of view.
when I first noticed the web site new design, it looks great and very appealing, but I was also a little bit worry, SCALE could turn just like another commercial show.
A few weeks before the show, I had some problem related to a pervious accident, I almost canceled the show, even if I knew, I really could not do that so close.
Two things happened, Volunteers in my group stepped in and helped me a lot and SCALE people helped with dedication, upto the show time, by making the loading and unloading of equipment as painless as possible.
I was also surprised by the fact vendors seemed to spend as much time trying to scan badges, than describing their products, but it seemed to always end-up in a good joke and in a very friendly way.
As a ".org", If I can present our "pet" project in such a relevant show, it is probably because, Show organizers feel it is in relation to their show and because they are commercial vendors participation.
I personaly enjoy the interraction between the mix of commercial and ".org" booths. Every vendor I had some interaction with, have been very nice.
As a ".org" I also have for goal to please the organizers, who are volunteers like us. I will do my best to not disapoint them, This require work, many nights with little sleep, but the result is always pleasing.
I checked the time on Saturday morning, when the show started, next time I checked it, was on Sunday night when the show ended. Our booth has been busy almost the whole time.
I feel SCALE 2008, was like a great wine. A wine that age very well and we will talk a long time about it. Keep it that way in the wine cellar, do not shake it to much and SCALE 2009 could be another great show. ;-)
Thank you to all the Vendors that helped to make this show happen for little "pet" projects like ours and Thank you to all the organizers who have done such a great job, behave very professionally without taking out the great "volunteer" feeling.
Sorry for my poor english.
Eugene Clement http://www.linuxastronomy.org/ (founder)
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