PGConf.EU 2011 - the speakers and the presentations

This part of the feedback is almost turning into a repost year from year. But it's a good thing to be reposting if any, so I'm doing it anyway. To start with, just take a look at these graphs:

Those are pretty fantastic ratings. A full 84%25 rated the content quality as 4 or 5, and only 1%25 rated it as less than 3. That basically comes down to there being no talks of bad quality. This confirms the feeling that we had when we tried to pick out the talks for this year - the number of great submissions where just huge. We had to reject around half the talks submitted, and there were only a few of those that we rejected because we thought they weren't very good. Most were simply rejected because we didn't have the time and space to accept them all.

The ratings people have given our speakers confirm what we have always thought to be one of the reasons people like the conference - and many other PostgreSQL conferences as well: you get to listen to and talk to the people who really know what they are talking about. Often because they are the very people who wrote the software in question. A whole 96%25 of all the ratings gave our speakers a score of 4 or 5 for their knowledge of the topic. And nobody scored lower than 3. These truly are the experts you get to meet!

Most of our speakers also scored very high on the Speaker Quality metric. Our top speakers this year were:

Speaker	Rating	Vote count	Standard deviation
Bruce Momjian	4.8	31	0.4
Ram Mohan	4.7	36	0.5
Selena Deckelmann	4.7	38	0.5
Magnus Hagander	4.6	52	0.6
Simon Riggs	4.6	43	0.6
Stephen Frost	4.6	18	0.5
Peter van Hardenberg	4.5	11	0.7
Gavin M. Roy	4.5	10	0.5
Greg Smith	4.5	68	0.7
Harald Armin Massa	4.4	10	0.5
Steve Singer	4.4	10	0.7
Gianni Ciolli	4.4	32	0.8
Dave Page	4.3	25	0.8
Heikki Linnakangas	4.3	12	0.9
Ed Boyajian	4.2	13	1.0
Marc Balmer	4.1	12	0.7
Dimitri Fontaine	4	11	0.8

This really is the reason why people come to the conference, and keep coming back the next year - our outstanding speakers! Thank you all for showing up this year to give your presentations, and we hope to see you again next year!

That concludes the posts I'm going to make about pgconf.eu feedback this year. Some of you have already asked about next year, and I'm not going to post any information about the feedback we got there - yet. We are reviewing the feedback we received, and are soon going to start looking for a good venue for next year. We have made the mistake before of announcing a location before we had a venue secured, and we're not going to do that again. We are going to announce it as soon as we know, but that will not be until we have actually decided on an exact venue. But we are absolutely planning to do it again next year, and sometime around the same time of the year. Exactly where we don't know yet...

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