GNOME 3 User Day: Debrief and analysis

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

Yesterday was the first GNOME 3 user day [1, 2]. Many thanks to everyone
who contributed.

I was really pleased with how the event went. Attendance was excellent,
and those who participated seemed to get a lot out of it. It certainly
seemed to boost enthusiasm, and I daresay that we managed to calm a few
critics (though there was surprisingly little of that, actually). I also
thought that the publicity that was generated was useful, and the fact
that we've held the session will come in handy in our ongoing PR work.

We might want to hold more of these events in the future, so it seems
worthwhile to examine how yesterday went. Some observations:

 * Attendance was good at all three sessions. The 15:00-16:00 session
was vastly more popular than the others though. Almost too popular.

 * The popularity of the second session made it difficult (though not
impossible) to manage the discussion. I ended up having to list the
questions that were asked, which I then called out in sequence. This was
a bit messy at times, but worked fairly well on the whole. (I eventually
transferred the list of questions to an Etherpad, which other volunteers
were then able to use.)

  - As a result of these experiences, the third and final session of the
day was organised using two channels - one for asking questions and one
for answering and discussing them. Though this was undoubtedly more
efficient, I actually thought that it impaired the atmosphere of the
event, since it left most of the participants disconnected from the
discussion.

  - I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on the best way to
organise these sessions in the future. Andre mentioned that there is a
bot that can be used for hosting meetings. That could be an interesting
line to pursue. Another possibility might be to use an Etherpad to
record the questions that are asked, in much the same way that we ended
the second session of the day.

 * In future, we need to have details on how the sessions will be
organised on the wiki prior to the event itself. This will ensure that
latecomers are informed about how we are organising things.

 * The questions asked in the sessions covered a lot of ground. Most
were design questions (generally relating to GNOME Shell), but technical
issues were also raised. There wasn't enough expertise in the channel to
answer the questions at times. Though I think it's fine to refer people
on or even to say 'I don't know', we do want to be able to address most
of the queries that are brought to us.

  - There are two ways we can approach this issue (that I can think of).
First - we can be clear about the kind of knowledge and expertise that
are being made available: we can say 'Andreas will be answering design
questions' or 'Fred will be taking questions about the GNOME 3
platform'. The other approach is to broaden the amount of expertise that
is on hand for each session. Having each one be co-hosted by a designer
and a developer could work.

Any thoughts about any of this? Anything that I've missed? (You can view
the logs of the event on the wiki [2].)

An aside: one thing that the user day made clear to me is how many
enthusiastic GNOME users there are out there. This project has a lot of
supporters - the more we can reach out to them, the better.

Best wishes,

Allan

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/UserDays/
[2] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/UserDays/2011-02-15
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