Thanks to our students, faculty and staff, alums, and volunteers who helped make The Future is Open 2019 possible this year. Now that the day is behind us, we want to reflect on the event and how we can make it better for 2020.
Do you have any thoughts on the event? Drop a comment here with any feedback you have and we will use this thread as a planning resource for next year’s event. If you don’t have specific feedback, here are some questions we’d like to know from you:
How satisfied were you with the conference? What did you think about date, location, sessions, speakers, and catering?
In your opinion, did the conference meet its objective of promoting Free and Open Source work in and around the RIT community? Why or why not?
How well was the conference structured?
Was there enough time for discussion?
Which topics would you like to see covered at future conferences?
Thanks for being a part of The Future is Open 2019. We hope to see you next year!
My initial thoughts are that I am super happy with how everything turned out! I don’t think any of us really knew how the day was going to go, given the fact that this was the first time running this event.
How satisfied were you with the event?
The date and time, in my opinion, was perfect. Most students are done with their midterms, and it’s at the tail end of Hacktoberfest. The food was also great, I loved the Panera and coffee
In your opinion, did the conference meet its objective of promoting Free and Open Source work in and around the RIT community?
Being able to meet with other like-minded individuals within the general Rochester area was a great experience. I loved how Remy’s keynote didn’t even touch upon code. It all being about the awareness and how open source works in favor of your typical company. Spreading this knowledge, and conversing with others about the ramifications of FOSS and open source was very constructive.
How well was the conference structured?
Overall, I think the conference was structured very well. The tracks were set up nicely, but like any other conference with tracks, you can only go to one talk per time slot
Was there enough time for discussion?
Of the talks I was present in, there seemed to be enough time for a healthy discussion of the subject.
Which topics would you like to see covered at future conferences?
I’m not sure! I would love to make this a recurring conference, and try to rope in other universities in the area. I would love to hear more talks from students, in addition to those out in the work force. Reaching out to a larger pool would allow us to gain more perspectives surrounding FOSS.
Agreed, I think it went very well and I enjoyed it a lot. I tried to plug it where I could and I think there’s a lot more people we could reach with more thorough advertising. It also would have been nice to have the schedule worked out a few days sooner (last-minute changes always happen but if I didn’t have a light schedule that week then the site would not have gotten many of the fixes that happened).
How satisfied were you with the conference?
I enjoyed the speakers very much and I think the day/time worked out well.
In your opinion, did the conference meet its objective of promoting Free and Open Source work in and around the RIT community?
Yes. I also enjoyed having both current RIT students/faculty as well as alumns since it gave a good breadth of topics. I also appreciated the content from related non-code programs such as design & digital humanities.
How well was the conference structured?
I don’t think the 3rd floor got utilized as well as it could have (and it seemed that people continuing talks post-panels tended to use the lobby instead). That said, I think the lower-levels-only kept people together which was nice too. I think there was also a student at one point who was hoping to use a lab so it might have made more sense to try to get the color room rather than using the 3rd floor lab and then the install-fest could have gone in the demo room or lobby.
I would also consider how much can be fit in a day. I think if you want to do more in a day than we did this time then you should consider having it across two days (or a day and a half). Granted, I did help with setup & stayed through the end of Remy’s extended Q&A, but it was a very full day. If you did end up going two-day in the future I’d also recommend adding slightly longer breaks. For a one-day event though it worked well but I don’t think you should try to pack the schedule much, if any, more.
Was there enough time for discussion?
I liked that there was a 30min series in addition to the 60min ones. I think some panels could have gone for 90min but many discussions seemed to only need 60min. On the flip side, not having 90min panels meant that I could go to more panels in a day, which was nice.
Which topics would you like to see covered at future conferences?
I was happy with the topics we had this year, particularly since I didn’t have to hear about code much. There was some discussion at panels about open community & open governance that people got fairly into (and I mention since some of those people are unlikely to know this thread exists) but personally it would depend on who & how a panel on open community/governance was done for whether I would want to go. I also think having a panel on open science could have been interesting.
PS: SJ glazed over the work to organize this when saying thanks to people and someone should steal the mic to thank him & F@M team next year. I found the conference very meaningful & I’m glad it happened.
PPS: It’s late at night and I’m not functional enough to proofread this; if something sounds wrong let me know and I’ll clarify/fix it.
How satisfied were you with the conference? What did you think about date, location, sessions, speakers, and catering?
I thought the conference went great! The talks were interesting and led to a lot of great discussions. The date did conflict with a build-a-thon that CSH does, but that can be worked out next year if I announce the conference sooner. I thought the location was good. The MAGIC building is a great place for this kind of thing. The catering was also great
In your opinion, did the conference meet its objective of promoting Free and Open Source work in and around the RIT community? Why or why not?
Personally, I learned a lot about the status of open source in RIT. I was fascinated by the experiences of others in the space, and was able to meet a lot of people I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to.
How well was the conference structured?
I thought it was well structured, but I was busy running the install-a-thon, so I didn’t get a chance to check out the whole thing. The opening and closing talks were good, though.
Was there enough time for discussion?
I saw a lot of talks and question/answer boards run long and break out into extra rooms we had reserved. This happened a lot, so it was good we had these rooms to overflow into.
Which topics would you like to see covered at future conferences?
The conversation of how FOSS gets developed is interesting to me, and is a subject i’d love to see explored more.
A couple of issues I had with the conference from the perspective of a speaker:
Make sure the Eventbrite information is correct. The information on that page had misspelled my name and my talk title; the title was not what I presented on nor proposed and I didn’t love being mis-represented. I would say if you’re not going to have accurate information there, then don’t put anything there and just put a link to the conference page.
In the program, organize it to show more information than just the talk title, presenter name, and time. Short abstracts were required for the conference proposals and could/should have been used. I’m pretty sure no one knew from the title alone that I was going to talk about the issues involved with maintaining open source projects over decades and the evolution of open source over that time, but that would have been understood from the abstract submitted. (I also would have liked more information about the other talks too as it would have helped choosing which ones to attend.)
From the perspective as an attendee, I think it’s great that this event happened and hope it continues. Catering was great, but gluten-free options would have been appreciated (the person I was with was unable to eat anything during the conference).
I was impressed. The date and time seemed to work well, and there were enough interesting topics that I had to actually decide what to go to. Overall a great day. I’m glad it happened and I’m glad I was able to be a part of it.
As a speaker, I do have a couple thoughts for improvement.
It would have been nice to be able to scope out where I was speaking, since MAGIC has some interesting facilities. Knowing what adapters to bring (I ended up needing to borrow a laptop), and being able to plan accordingly for the room would have been great (would I be standing? sitting? where can I set my laptop? etc)
Knowing what I submitted in my proposal, it seems like there was some missed opportunity for promoting the event or having more detail on the schedule about each talk.
I apologize this happened in the first place. It was a mistake that the Eventbrite fell out of sync with the website. In the future, we will use the website as the single source of truth, and avoid putting too much detail in the Eventbrite.
Noted, we should consider more dietary needs next time! Thanks for pointing this out.
It is correct that it was an unsuccessful attempt to use this content beyond the CFP form. For next year, if we have enough lead time, we could publish new blog posts on the FOSSRIT GH Pages website to profile each session. Each post is created from a template, so it’s easy to plug in each speaker’s content. We could populate content on a rolling basis as we get it, so the publishing schedule is spread out.
@ctmartin might be able to help us rethink a more intuitive way of showing the shortened summary text on the event schedule in time for the next event.
Overall I think the event was a large success. The only real thing I would recommend for the future is to make more signage for the actual event to help direct traffic. Condensing everything to just the first floor may make it easier to corral people and communicate where things are being held. Overall I really enjoyed the talks given and I feel like I learned a lot.
