2019 edX Staff Retrospective

Owned by Ned Batchelder (Deactivated)
Last updated: Apr 02, 2019 by Ben Piscopo (Deactivated)

What went well at the 2019 Open edX conference in San Diego?  What could have gone better?  Add bullet points here, or send an email to oscm@edx.org if you want a more private channel.

Went well:

  • Ned caught a behind-the-back throw while juggling on stage
    • Nimisha showed off her fresh new juggling skills to a wide audience
  • Thanks to the people who went out during the keynotes and stopped the random loud construction noises
    • Every time I went to do something like that during the conference, it warmed my heart to see at least two other edX people moving on it at the same time.
  • The #openedx-2019-stories Slack channel worked well, lots of great stuff in there
    • Is someone tasked with going through #openedx-2019-stories and reporting out to the rest of the company?
  • Thank you for including vegetarian options with each meal
  • Signage with arrows were surprisingly accurate this time around. (Not sure how much control over architecture we have... but it worked!)
  • Separate locations for plenaries and breakouts/talks was great. Outside space was well-utilized! 
  • ID Summit as an area of focus was well-received. (ID Summit retro happening here, if interested.)
    • This seemed to bring in a ton of interesting people who otherwise would have ignored/skipped a 'techie' conference. I heard at least one attendee say that they were worried that they wouldn't be technical enough but that it wasn't actually a problem.
  • The view from the dinner reception was amazing.
  • West-coast time shift made it a little easier for some normally late risers to help with early morning
  • Dev summit is my favorite day.  Collaborating with the community and getting a shared understanding of how we can help each other is a great feeling and a great outcome.


Could have gone better:

  • Why did the laptop fail, forcing Ned to juggle on stage?
  • Let's bring a can of WD40 next time; there were some really squeaky conference room doors there
  • For lightning talks, it would be helpful if the tech person renamed the files with the speaker's name-- a lot of them turned out to be called openedx2019_presentation or similar
  • The pastry breakfasts weren't useful for me; it would be nice if each meal had some sort of protein
    • Agreed - this was rough.
  • Would be nice to have tea available every time there is coffee
  • Dependent on the specific room door setup, but people entering/exiting during the sessions was sometimes very disruptive. Maybe consider limiting entrance after session start for doors that are right by the presenter
  • There was (some) confusion around a-la-carte pricing of Tuesday and Friday.
  • Would be good to have representatives from UX and Data Science/Eng.
  • Reminding folks to provide per-session feedback earlier in the conference.
  • We were scrambling for power strips during the tutorial sessions. Especially for ones that last three hours long and involve dev work, we need power.
  • Not having an accurate estimate for how many people would attend caused at least one tutorial session to drastically under-provision their cloud environment for the tutorial, causing multiple issues.
  • A lot of signs kept blowing down; maybe next time all outdoor signs should be taped.
  • Guest WiFi blocking ports caused technical difficulties for a few tutorials.  Workarounds were found, but would have been nice to not need to workaround.
  • Giving more guidance to dev summit room leaders ahead of time (on the wiki? in person?) might have helped focus the conversation on more clear goals/outcomes. 
  • I heard there was a staff walkthrough of Center Hall, but it happened before I arrived.  I spent a good part of Tuesday helping people at the registration table but not really knowing where everything was myself!
    • Let's film a VR walkthrough in the Portugal location (Ben is happy to do this :).


Ideas for questions to ask attendees on a survey:

  • (ideas here)
  • Sched prompts for feedback at the end of each day. Can we leverage that better? Is there more success with that mechanism than a big week-later survey?
  • From Olga: Capture Instructional Design success stories/pain points, broken out by Open Source installation demographics  e.g. http://bit.ly/2019edXCourseAuthoring