Getting good feedback on conference sessions
Tobias Mayer has a post up on "the inadequacy of feedback" - that is, of existing ways to give conference speakers feedback: in particular the dreaded "feedback form". Agile2010 is still a long way off, but that is precisely the right timing to raise this sort of issue. Here is my comment on Tobias' point:The basic question, it seems to me, is "Why don't we simply trust session participants to give speakers feedback, when they want and in the form they want ?" Which is a variant of "Why don't we simply treat people as responsible adults ?"
In this case (and I suspect in many other cases), there are non-trivial reasons why the system is arranged that way; it's not a rhetorical question.
The structure of the system is such that participants see many sessions in a short amount of time. They are likely, coming back from the conference, to are busier than usual and thus not to have time to provide feedback to so many speakers in a timely fashion. They are likely to have forgotten the sessions which had least value to them, which are precisely the ones that would benefit most from feedback.
(If you are a conference participant, please keep one thing in mind: the session you liked the least are those that can benefit most from your feedback. If you're sitting in a session that you're tempted to leave... my advice is do leave, after leaving a short note on a blank sheet of paper (or the provided feedback form) explaining what would make the session more valuable. That's the win-win option.)
Feedback only matters, anyway, for what you are going to iterate on. If you speak at conferences regularly, but tend to do a different session each time, feedback on your delivery matters - feedback on the session not so much. So, feedback should be tailored to the profile of the speaker (which is an issue with a blank sheet of paper just as much as with a generic form). You really need time to say "this is the feedback I'd like to have".
In short, a conference like Agile200x is the wrong kind of setting in which to ask for feedback that might improve a conference session. If you want to get feedback at or after the conference, you're going to go against the grain, inevitably.
Review time is a better time to get feedback on a session. One of the biggest areas for improvement in Agile200x, in my opinion, is the impact of session reviews on the actual sessions.
Another opportunity for the speaker is to present their session first to a small but representative audience, outside of the big conference and ahead of time. Then you can invite people specifically for the purpose of getting feedback.
Yet another opportunity is to speak at conferences where the format ensures appropriate feedback. PLoP is a conference entirely focused on giving people useful feedback. Others like AYE are heavily experiential, cater to a small audience by design, and build in plenty of time for interacting with speakers. There is more than one feedback-friendly conference format !
If you are interested in speaking at Agile2010 (and I'd like to encourage you to do so), keep in mind that you can get plenty of feedback before the conference, that you can build "getting good feedback" into the design of your session, and that you can ask the conference organizers for help in getting the type of feedback you'd like to have.
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