Comments noted.
As I'm helping put in a bid for FOSS09 in Sydney, I'm keen to see the
results of your evaluation analysis, but am daunted by the prospect of
reading 700 scanned forms. Tabulated results + list of comments would
certainly be of interest.
When do you expect to have this information? I'm hoping we can see it
before our draft version of our bid is finished in around a month.
Dave Patton wrote:
Cameron Shorter wrote:
With a globally distributed, tech savvy community such as ours, I
think that we should avoid using paper for all but the essential
legal documents.
Paper can't be machine processed, eg: searched, and requires valuable
man hours to read and processed.
For evaluation forms, I suggest we use a web based system in future.
For FOSS4G2007, the evaluation forms for the Conference
were done on paper, and the tabulation of those was
part of the services that the meeting management company,
Sea To Sky, provides to their clients.
For FOSS4G2007, the evaluation forms for the Workshops
and Labs were done on paper. Using a web-based system
was discussed, but was rejected in part because of
concern that it wasn't practical when two people were
sharing the same computer. The paper evaluation forms
are going to be scanned to PDF documents(1 per Workshop
or Lab), so they will be able to be searched and read.
The tabulation of the numeric results will be done by
hand, by members of the Workshop Committee, and made
available in a PDF document.
I don't have any hard evidence, but I think there will
be a higher proportion of evaluations filled out when
they are on paper, right in front of the attendees, with
prompts from the Instructors to fill them in, than using
a web-based system. Some people at FOSS4G2007(although
not many) did complete the paper evaluation form and hand
it in later at the registration desk. Scanning the paper
forms to PDF allows for a distributed process of tabulation,
and could possibly be done via Amazon Mechanical Turk:
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
For future conferences, direct involvement of, and payment to,
a local group for the management and tabulation of paper
evaluation forms could provide a tangible local benefit.
--
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
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