Community Survey Blog

As promised from yesterday’s blog post, we’re sharing all the answers to the open-ended questions we asked in the survey about the Mozilla Summit 2008.  Hope you find these interesting.  Please send us your comments.  And, thanks again if you took the survey.

What people liked most

• Meeting other members of the community and putting face to names, getting to know people outside of IRC/Bugzilla.
• Getting to known the Localizers and hear their stories.
• Hearing about new projects like Ubiquity
• Staying together in 1 hotel, eating meals together
• Moz Café- gave an intimate feel to a large event
• Hallway conversations
• The social interactions
• “It doesn’t matter what you do for Mozilla, you can talk to everyone and no one needs a tie.”

What People Liked Least

• Too many sessions, couldn’t do everything, not inviting more people.
• More recording and video for those who couldn’t attend
• Bus Ride- Sorry shit happens
• The pacing felt a little too rushed
• More Down time
• Communication barriers, felt they weren’t fluent/comfortable enough in English to speak up in discussions
• Printed schedules
• Not “the summit” persay, but I was frustrated by the lack of forum for participants to chat in before the summit. I understood the need for the mailing list to be pretty low traffic, but having a separate, opt-in mailing list, webforum, or other method for participants to chat in would’ve been very helpful and probably have reduced the amount of questions sent to the mailing list and Dan directly.
• Well, besides the travel mess at the end, which was handled brilliantly but still was quite messy… For all the talk about getting some agreed goals for the next 2 years at the beginning of the summit, there seemed to be no follow-through or actual project goals set, or evey really discussed after the first day. That felt weird. The XULRunner breakout was a complete bitch-fest and made me feel quite awful… I had to leave
• Understand the audience- non-native English speakers
• There were 2 groups of contributors: “The Real Developers” and “localizers”. Unfortunately this is common behavior of developers directed to localizers, not Mozilla specific.
• The icebreaker didn’t work for me, since there was only one other person who had the same sticker as me, and that happened to be another Mozilla employee. Kind of defeated the point of having an icebreaker. The other icebreaker we did was an exact copy of one done at an earlier Summit and I did not find it that engaging.
• I was disappointed that some of the sessions that were initially advertised never materialized and in some cases were replaced by sessions that were more about “status” and less about the future of Mozilla.
• There was no time to enjoy the activities around Whistler unless you came early or stay late, which I could not do. It would have been better to leave some free time on one of the days so we could have actually been outside.
• I needed dinner on Monday night after a day of travel, and found that others shared my opinion – they were still hungry after the reception.

Improvements

• Have a 1 hour lightning talk session in the morning, for all attendees (i.e. no conflicting sessions), where every presenter for that day gets exactly 3 minutes to plug and summarize their presentation. No slides. It would make it more likely that people went to the right thing, and give people at least a taste of what’s going on across the project even if they are e.g. stuck in the Thunderbird room because that’s their main focus.
• Badges with names on both sides.
• Speed ear-bending: an hour session where Mitchell, John, Mark, Frank, Brendan, Shaver, Mike etc. sit at tables, and people queue up to get 3 minutes to bend their ear about a particular pet topic. Exhausting for them, perhaps! But maybe good for openness and getting issues raised.
• A location with more than one sub-seven-hour route to the airport? Seriously, well done to everyone concerned – a triumph of organization. (What is a “Breakout Session” in the question above?)
• more free time. The icebreaker the first day sucked, and didnt do anything for me.
• The wifi was splotchy in the conference rooms.
• The location was amazing though, and i wanted more time to explore.
• MozCafe was a great idea, and we need more fun things in there next time. (maybe two rockbands).
• i didnt understand the lightshow and why we spent so much money getting that setup and imported there. Dont need it next time.
• Overall, i loved it, and enjoyed meeting new people, especially the localizers.
• Maybe a designated block, once per day, where there are no sessions, no lunch – just deliberately-idle time? It’s hard to have to trade off meet-ups with interesting people against eating lunch or attending a session – explicit downtime gives introverts a chance to recharge on their own, and social butterflies a chance to flit around without feeling like they’re missing things
• a giant photo session for all? some paparazzis specifically assigned to put the people photos into mozilla digital memory bank?

Suggestions

• Community Directory

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