FeedBack

Please give feedback

We would like to turn Berlin Buzzwords into the best conference ever. To do that we need your input - speakers, attendees, sponsors: Please give feedback below. We'll try to incorporate that into next year's edition - or tell you why we can't.

One thing - we've been asked quite often why some really great talks were very short or whether there were any sponsored talks. Quick answer: Our program committee reviewing process turned those talks into short ones. No there were no sponsored talks at all. For a longer answer check out the Behind the scenes scheduling article.

 

Strengths of the conference

Tell us what you like about the conference - what makes you go to bbuzz instead of other conference. These are things we definitely should not change about the concept.

* Time after time I´m amazed about the #lucene ecosystem. Especially #elasticsearch is just awesome.

* Lukas Kahwe Smith @lsmith bbuzz was interesting as always, think the move to shorter talks slots its great, however too many speakers took to long to get to the meat

* From @SanneGrinovero: I loved the 20 minute talks format. I think it was very effective to keep speakers focused on is most valuable to share, and avoids generaly sleepiness. It makes preparation harder - I know as I had one - but I think it was well worth it and am gratefull for all the "hallway talks" it seeded from who wanted more details, gave me even more opportunities to talk face to face.

* Matt Patterson (@fidothe): I really enjoyed myself, and learnt a lot. I think the 20 minute format was a great idea - it forces a speaker to concentrate on the essentials of what they want to say.

 

Weaknesses you encountered

Tell us what you didn't like and where we could improve.

* We got way too few submissions from women (zero!) - this year this was fixed as we had invited Leslie as an awesome keynote speaker before sending the CfP out. If you know of women in big data that you want to see on stage at Buzzwords - list them here or tell us via info@

* From a blog post and attendees: print the name on both sides of the badges

* From one of the attendees: Publish the current schedule on large screens, in particular have the lightning talk schedule on those (updated regularly of course). Ppl loved the lightning talks but usually found them only accidentally.

* Website: Content was too hidden. Stuff posted in news or on the wiki should be linked to from sub menus to make it easier to find for attendees.

* From one of the sponsors: Please print affiliations on the badges. _comment from the organisers_: Those weren't on there intentionally. People working on open source projects in particular at Apache always wear multiple hats. Not printing affiliations relieves attendees to decide for one of those hats and makes them remain an individual person instead of being "developer x from company y".

* Matt Patterson (@fidothe) The website schedule was buggy on mobile devices - it trimmed off most of the third track (see https://flic.kr/p/bUWiDr). Also, there was some confusion about how long my talk was supposed to be (listed as 'special format' in the schedule, in a 40-minute slot). Would be good to know exactly how long I was supposed to be speaking for :-)

 

Opportunities for Berlin Buzzwords

Tell us opportunities for the conference - what additional formats should we offer, where should we integrate the audience further?

* Christoph @chr_boe: More thanks to #bbuzz organizers and contributors. I'd love to see a talk about #Hadoop YARN and security in Hadoop next time.

* MacbethIII @MacbethIII: “@pavlobaron: Impossible to talk in 20 min about something that needs 45. No depth, sorry #bbuzz <- Correct 20 min. is not enough.

* One thing proposed by @fs111: Ask speakers to not only provide information on the required skill level (beginner, advanced, intermediate) but ask them to explicitly list the skills needed to follow the speaker. * From one of the session chairs: HBase talks were in the wrong order, need to find a way to get speakers to tell us the right order.

* From one of the machine learning guys: Speakers don't read what other talks are around them. If they did, they could save up to 10 introductory slides because the speaker before them already included them. Need to find a way to get speakers to interact with each other more.

* From @nathan_gs: Stick to one track for every room, eg. store & process, search, analytics & machine learning. Especially the second day a lot of interesting talks with very related subjects were at the same time. * From one of the attendees: Have a printed booklet including abstracts - makes judging talks easier and allows ppl to leave their Laptop back home.

* From attendees: We want to buy t-shirts, we would like to have bbuzz stickers for laptops

* We had talks on related topics (e.g. machine learning or hbase) where speaker either repeated content introduced in an earlier talk or where talks were in the wrong order (deep technical, intro, shallow technical). How can we fix that? - @MaineC: Euro Clojure had a very nice concept for selecting talks: Instead of getting them rated by a program committee speakers were asked to provide feedback to all submissions in the form of requests for improvements. After another round of improvements those talks were accepted that had gotten the least remaining requests for improvements. I'd like to suggest to do another experiment next year: In addition to the curated tracks have one speaker to speaker track that has a separate CfP maybe where content is selected that same way. That way speakers at least in that track have to communicate beforehand - the hypothesis is that this way the resulting program is much better aligned and talks improve in terms of quality. What do you think?

* @fidothe: It would be lovely to have future conference schedules in Lanyrd too https://lanyrd.com/

 

Threads to the conference

Tell us what kind of threads you see wrt buzz.

* From attendees: Sponsors please be aware of the conference format - silver girls are definitely not a good fit for bbuzz

 

Any other feedback in other media

Find any other feedback? Blog posts, news articles etc - link them here.

Blog post (photos and feedback included):

https://dmitrykan.blogspot.fi/2012/06/berlin-buzz-words-2012-impressions....

https://www.sentric.ch/my-retrospective-on-berlin-buzzwords-2012 * https://blog.florian-hopf.de/2012/06/berlin-buzzwords-2012.html

https://in.relation.to/Bloggers/BackFromBerlin