Chris Miller raised the issue of session evals over on his blog. This is something that I also feel quite strongly about, even though I've never presented at Lotusphere (I have done presentations for my hobby, and I too look for feedback about how I did, how the subject and material went, and so on).
I also remember from my old IBM Mainframe days going to G.U.I.D.E conferences around Europe. Here they had a session evaluation system that seemed to work well. What they did, if my mind serves me right, was:
- give out small slips of paper to every person who entered the room.
- Requested answers to about three questions: Session number/speaker effectiveness/content rating and comments.
- Collected them at the end of the session
- And, here's the clincher: they were collated pretty much there and then. Results were available at the end of the conference, because in the closing session they gave away a decent prize to each of the best IBM and non-IBM speakers.
Maybe that could be extended to Lotusphere:
- Give out slips at each session. In that way, nobody could complain that the wireless sucked/run out of eval sheets in the conference pad/can't be bothered to log on/whatever.
- Reduce them to the barest essentials: session title, speaker effectiveness (rate 1-5), content value (1-5), your conference number (in a moment) and space for comments.
- Calculate a best IBM, and non-IBM speaker, by averaging the ratings per session (in that way, a sparsely attended session can still get a good overall rating), and do it during the conference.
- In the closing session, give away a decent prize: say iPad, or a Thinkpad, to each of the best speakers. In that way, you generate a little more enthusiasm on the part of each speaker to give of her best, because of the element of competition.
- And, to encourage the attendees to fill the evals in, give away a prize to an attendee too - say the iPad/Thinkpad, or even a free ticket to next year's 'Sphere. That's why you add your conference number to the session eval slips.
Update: see another post from Chris, and check the comments, too. Maybe there's some movement here? Comments (0)
Mick Moignard February 8th, 2010 03:05:10 PM