Feedback from PGDay.EU - the speakers
The next issue of my "pie-chart-overflow blog posts about PGDay feedback" is about our speakers. The speakers are, if that's not obvious, the reason that people come to the conference. Having good speakers is an absolute requirement if we want to keep up the quality of the conference. Other things like venue and price are certainly important, but nothing compares to the actual content of the conference - which is provided by our speakers.
I'm very happy to say that we seem to have manage to keep the very high numbers for Speaker Quality that we had from last year (differing less than 3%25 which is well within the margin of error). The same goes for the scores our speakers got on their knowledge of the topic - indicating that we've managed to attract some of the most skilled speakers in the world. Which is not surprising given that in many cases, we the person speaking about a feature is actually the guy who wrote it. What is more surprising is that these same people are rated as very good speaker - which we all know isn't always true about your stereotypical developer.
Just like last year, we're not going to post the complete list of speaker ratings, given that they are easy to read wrong. But here is a list of our top speakers, excluding any that had less than 5 ratings. Any speakers who have fewer than 10 should be considered a very uncertain number, and I've again included the standard deviation to determine the uncertainty. We had a lot more speakers this year, so I have only included those scoring 4 or above this time around. Each speaker has received his own detailed score, of course.
Place | Speaker | Quality Score | Standard deviation | Number of votes 1 | Dimitri Fontaine | 4.8 | 0.5 | 8 2 | Mason Sharp | 4.7 | 0.9 | 11 2 | Magnus Hagander | 4.7 | 0.7 | 29 4 | Simon Riggs | 4.6 | 0.7 | 52 4 | Simon Phipps | 4.6 | 0.9 | 45 6 | Andreas Scherbaum | 4.5 | 0.7 | 34 6 | Ed Boyajian | 4.5 | 1.1 | 33 8 | Bruce Momjian | 4.4 | 0.9 | 54 8 | Gianni Ciolli | 4.4 | 0.8 | 38 8 | Tim Bunce | 4.4 | 1.0 | 10 11 | Jan Aleman | 4.2 | 1.0 | 11 12 | Tim Child | 4.1 | 0.8 | 9 12 | Michael Meskes | 4.1 | 1.2 | 10 14 | Bernd Helmle | 4.0 | 0.6 | 6 14 | Heikki Linnakangas | 4.0 | 0.8 | 30 14 | Linas Virbalas | 4.0 | 0.9 | 10
The list based on Speaker Knowledge looks slightly different, but not very much. Given that our speaker knowledge has been rated even higher than speaker quality, I've only included those who scored 4.6 or higher (which is a fantastically high cutoff)
Place | Speaker | Knowledge Score | Standard deviation | Number of votes 1 | Tim Child | 5 | 0 | 9 2 | Joe Conway | 4.9 | 0.3 | 10 3 | Simon Riggs | 4.8 | 0.7 | 52 3 | Linas Virbalas | 4.8 | 0.4 | 9 3 | Magnus Hagander | 4.8 | 0.8 | 29 3 | Dimitri Fontaine | 4.8 | 0.5 | 8 7 | Andreas Scherbaum | 4.7 | 0.8 | 34 7 | Bruce Momjian | 4.7 | 1.0 | 53 9 | Mason Sharp | 4.6 | 1.2 | 11 9 | Heikki Linnakangas | 4.6 | 0.8 | 30 9 | Simon Phipps | 4.6 | 1.0 | 45 9 | Gianni Ciolli | 4.6 | 0.8 | 38 9 | Tim Bunce | 4.6 | 1.3 | 10 9 | David Fetter | 4.6 | 0.6 | 16
A great big thanks to all our speakers - you did a fantastic job.
We will need to work hard to keep up our recruiting of speakers for next years. If you were considering but decided not to submit a talk for some reason - please let us know why, so we can improve! Or if you have any ideas in general on our processes around this. For example, we had no female speakers at all this year - we know you're out there, and we certainly want you there, so what do we need to change to make this more interesting for you as a potential speaker? The same goes for other groups that we were missing of course: now is the time to let us know so we have the time to change things before next year!
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