-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 8
Format Notes from Mark
Three caveats to these notes:
- This is a response to ken's notes
- I've not listened to the recordings
- I did not help shape the format (The format was solidified by the time I became a co-organizer)
The discussions sessions went very well. None of them happened like the planning, but they happened. They did happen, and it was 5 to 10x of any other conference I've attended. Either there is one presenter and everyone listens. Or there is 1 presenter and a line of serfs asking questions of the royalty on the dais.
In the sessions, between 3 and 8 people offered comments, not to the speaker, but to the audience. That experience was very, very different. The vision was that 15 or 20% of the audience would come to the front to participate, and it was not that much. However, 6 to 12% is way more than most conferences. And while the reality did not meet the ideal, it was good, very good.
The plan envisioned 30 seconds of sharing. Given that the discussion participants were forming their ideas on the fly, the idea that some people went long could have been anticipated. I don't think too many just rambled, so much as struggled to describe concepts that were beginning to gel in their minds.
I did listen to some discussion recordings. I wanted the quote from Dave Farley about when I said there was a commit phase and an acceptance phase, I meant that in the strict, prescriptive sense. That recorded discussion (after Brian Niles presentation) is compelling. I liked listening to it. I liked that there were some new (to me) voices: Saleem and the woman from Armory talking about spinnaker.
But more so in sessions that did not have a well-known-name like Brian as the speaker, lots of voices where heard. And they were not conference presenters being blow-hards. (more time in front of a mic! Yay!) The voices in the discussion after the Liatrio sponsored presentation were genuine DevOps peasants. The riff-raff. People not working at VC funded unicorns-to-be or startups on track to be bought by unicorns. They were people.
Liked that the discussion portion returned power to the people.
Better interview microphones. We should look into the tech used by sports and news broadcasting for doing 1 on 1 interviews. These microphones are more forgiving of where the speaker is, but the have other trade-offs.
I'll refer to the guy from Apple who said he'd taken twice as many notes as normally does at conferences. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. And I liked it.