Feedback from pgday.eu

I've finally had the time to summarize the feedback we received from pgday.eu.

We received feedback from about 35 people, which is obviously way less than we were hoping for. Ideas for how to improve this for next time are very welcome! This also means that the figures we have are not very exact - but they should give a general hint about what our attendees thought.

I just sent out the individual session feedback summaries to each individual speaker. These will not be published - it's of course fine for each speaker to publish his own feedback if he wants to, but the conference organizers will not publish the detailed per-session data.

The statistics we do have show that most of our speakers did a very good job, and that the attendees were in general very happy with the sessions. We have also received a fairly large amount of comments - both to the conference and the speakers - which will help us improve specific points for next year!

I'll show a couple of graphs here with the total across all sessions and speakers. In these graphs, 5 is the highest score and 1 is the lowest.

The attendees also seemed to be very happy with our speakers, which is something I'm very happy to hear about. It's also good to see that almost nobody felt the speakers didn't know very well what they were talking about - always a worry with a conference that has so many experienced community people attending.

Actually trying to figure out which speaker is best using this data is very difficult. But here's a list of the top speakers based on speaker quality, who had more than 5 ratings on their talks. The list includes all speakers with an average score of at least 3.5. There are a lot more hovering around that line, but there has to be a cutoff somewhere... Again note that there are still not that many ratings to consider, so values are pretty unstable. I've included the standard deviation as well to make sure this is visible.

Place | Speaker | Score | Stddev | Num 1 | Gavin M. Roy | 4.9 | 0.5 | 18 2 | Guillaume Lelarge | 4.9 | 0.4 | 7 3 | Robert Hodges | 4.8 | 0.4 | 13 4 | Magnus Hagander | 4.8 | 0.4 | 20 5 | Jean-Paul Argudo | 4.8 | 0.5 | 8 6 | Joshua D. Drake | 4.6 | 0.7 | 9 7 | Simon Riggs | 4.6 | 0.6 | 17 8 | Dimitri Fontaine | 4.5 | 0.5 | 14 9 | Greg Stark | 4.3 | 0.5 | 8 10 | Vincent Moreau | 4.1 | 0.6 | 8 11 | Mark Cave-Ayland | 4.0 | 0.6 | 11 12 | David Fetter | 3.9 | 1.1 | 9 13 | Gabriele Bartolini | 3.7 | 1.0 | 15 14 | Heikki Linnakangas | 3.6 | 0.7 | 9

All of these are clearly very good numbers.

So once again, a big thanks to our speakers for their good work. And also a very big thanks to those who did fill out the session feedback forms - your input is very valuable!

Update: Yes, these graphs were made with a python script calling the Google Charts API. Does anybody know of a native python library that will generate goodlooking charts without having to call a remote web service?


Comments

Tried matplotlib already?

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

I used it for customer documents and it was pretty nice :)

Thanks for doing the legwork here again.

Posted on Nov 27, 2009 at 22:03 by dim.

Haha, I don't know which computation you did that put me on top of the speakers. Nevertheless, that's nice :)

Posted on Nov 27, 2009 at 22:22 by Guillaume Lelarge.

That's the closest one I found. But looking through the galleries I have to say most of it doesn't look nearly as good as the stuff out of the Google Charts stuff. They do support a lot more different types though, but we all know that the PHBs only care about good looking, three dimensional, pie charts :-)

Posted on Nov 27, 2009 at 22:29 by Magnus.

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Conferences

I speak at and organize conferences around Open Source in general and PostgreSQL in particular.

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PGDay Chicago 2024
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