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From Electromagnetic Field

Contents

Who?

  • More big names / awesome speakers.

What?

What went right?

  • Having bbqs for us to cook our own food was excellent.
  • Toilets were also kept fairly clean
  • Straw bales made great seats
  • Everyone was awesome

What could be improved?

  • Camp Hygiene
    • Compost toilets are much better than smelly chemical ones - http://www.thunderboxes2go.co.uk/
    • Small table near taps would be nice, helps with washing up.
    • Perhaps a rudimentary platform with some guttering underneath to carry waste water away from taps, was a bit damp by the end
  • Signs, maps etc
    • Create a map of the villages and sign them adequately to make them easier to locate.
  • Venues
    • Dedicated children stuff, kids want to learn / hack too!
      • We were teaching children to solder over at the Nottinghack tent, children don't need specific 'children' activities, just need to be welcome at all activities - Gmjhowe
      • NottingHack were generally awesome. Thanks guys. However, some more child oriented stuff would have been good. The main issue there was that kids weren't allowed until very late in the planning stage. Again, if the lack of stuff for kids had been pointed out, thing such as a bubble machine, simple projects, etc. could have been swiftly arranged.
    • Projectors - plasma screens were annoyingly small - Projectors hard to read in daytime
      • This wasn't made clear. I could have brought a projector quite easily.
    • Venues need ushers of sorts, to time things better, to sanity check naff (small text) slideshows.
  • Talks / scheduling of talks
    • It has been said a few times that the talks were missed by a lot of people, and that better comms, etc. would have been useful. However, since nearly every time I walked past the talk tents the crowd was out the door, I'd suggest that if everyone who wanted to attend a talk had done, it would have been clear the venues were too small. I skipped two talks as there was no seating, and certainly there were extra seats added with bales, and they too were normally full.
    • A twitter feed or something of Next Up and any changes to the schedule would've been really useful for us.
  • The shuttle bus from the coach park was a great idea. One to/from the train station would be great next time too, or better details of local buses - there was very sparse information online in general about this. Had to come by train because National Express was sold out by the time we checked! :)

What went wrong?

  • Children's ticket costs didn't fairly reflect the lack of stuff for little folk
    • I disagree - having a very small child, she was free, and yet, very generously, she got her own badge (Tilda). The hay bales were her favourite part (aside from singing to the crowd from the stage) and she was generally overjoyed at all the things happening.
      • Your child (under 5 was free & got a Tilda), my two (7 & 9) paid for day tickets got little in return (youngest didn't get involved in anything except lock picking and that was under duress), I tried to buy Tilda's for mine but there were non to buy (£25 a pop) which is sad but also saved me £50, shame stuff that my two could have got involved in (on day) wasn't made clear or better advertised.
        • My child (also under 5) didn't get a Tilda but we found enough to keep him busy. The soldering would probably have been ok for older children. I would agree with better sign posting of what was occurring in the different villages and where they were. We only found Nottingham Hackspace was doing interesting things with soldering by accident.
  • Reduced cost of Tildas for day participants (kids on day ticket paid full price with nothing but a keyring and pamphlet in return)
  • Volunteers / organisers should have reduced ticket costs (pays to help out / volunteer)
    • I disagree. It would have made more sense to push the volunteer aspect a bit harder, as it was kind of expected. Award "cool points" rather than attack the budget - it would only get gamed, and could kill the instant "I'll sort that" ethos if money came in to it.
  • It'd be good to have rubbish sorting/recycling
  • Badges being slightly late - a shame
  • No clarity on where the recorded talks are? Lots of people requesting them, they were recorded, but where are they now? - See EMF2012_Video
    • This could have been done better - we had lots of plans for a Vimeo channel with uploads after every talk, but unfortunately the Streaming Team ended up far too busy just making sure the talks had AV, and were recorded at all, let alone uploaded.
  • Lack of food. There was a huge wait for the burger van.
  • Number of showers and toilets. Seemed too low, but actually worked well (people improvised hay bale seats!). However, spreading them out a bit would have been better - a lot of guys used a tree rather than made the walk to the single urinals block.
  • That the welding workshop didn't go ahead was a big disappointment. Blacksmithing was fantastic fun, well done to those guys!

Where?

When?

  • Allow people to arrive the day before
    • Make the helping out bit clearer. We didn't come down the evening before to help because it wasn't clear that we could. W!T!H! and HAR plainly said "Come and help set-up/break-down, and we will feed you!" which worked great.
      • I'm local and offered to help but wasn't engaged to do so (as hadn't got 3 day ticket[?]), I did want to be of assistance and was active on IRC before/during/afterwards (w1bble)
        • We tried to engage with everyone who volunteered, some people fell through the gaps for a variety of reasons. I'm very sorry that we didn't engage with you as best we could SamLR
    • the problem I had on helping out is that because the talk times were not distributed til the start, by the time I knew what stuff I did definitely want to go to, all the main slots were taken - Gricey
    • I think for setup they were limited to the number of people they could have on site so may not of been able to let people in on the thursady --'RepRap' Matt (talk)
      • Matt is correct, during set up/tear down we could only have ~40 people on site. We had a lot of people volunteer to come down on Thursday night which wasn't really any help to us (as the majority of the hard work was Wednesday and Thursday day time). SamLR
        • Actually, as it turned out, Thursday night (Friday morning) we were still setting up the staging and AV in the venues. There was still plenty of stuff to do! --Naxxfish (talk) 12:47, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Why?

Specifically...

Workshop tent

The Good

  • The tent was big and bright
  • There was plenty of activity and it looked exciting.

The Bad

  • Full of non-workshop people - The tent was taken over (at least on Friday and Saturday) by people soldering Tildas and other projects not related to projects. At one point a workshop leader asked if he could have some table space but was told that the Tilda project was more important and that he should go outside to do the workshop instead.
  • No projector
  • No Whiteboard - if 'proper' whiteboards cannot be sourced or are too expensive, galvanised sheet can be used instead and looks way cooler!
  • Perhaps a bit too big
  • uneven floor made tables & chairs unsteady

Suggestions

  • Have a separate tent for generic hacking, and have workshops tents suitable for 20-30 people, kitted out with appropriate facilities.
  • Have a "Workshop Angel" who workshop leaders can go to with any problems.
  • NottingHack is looking to take on the whole workshop tent for 2014, current very ruff and earl plans is two tents kitted out for scheduled workshops and a big EMF Hackspace tent, were also offering to do scheduling of workshop in the tents. We will also be looking at getting the uk hackspace involved in kitting out the EMF hackspace tent. --'RepRap' Matt (talk)
  • Split the workshop in to several tents around various disciplines, e.g. metal working, wood working, electronics, misc
  • Perhaps a smaller workshop area with tables and access to tools for led workshops, then a large more general space for general hacking that's not specific to a particular workshop would work well. --Naxxfish (talk) 12:50, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Schedule

The Good

  • Clear link to schedule on the front page
  • Amount of sessions and things to do

The Bad

  • There was no way to give/find more information for a talk/workshop.
  • It was hard to find printed copies of the schedule
  • It wasn't clear or consistently marked when sessions spanned multiple half-hour slots.

Suggestions

  • Have each session title be a link to more information (perhaps on a wiki page) - see 28c3 schedule
  • Have a schedule printer - press a button on the printer and an up to date schedule pops out.
    • Nice, but paper will become out of date if there are changes - better to not let people rely on paper schedules when the online one is always current. --Naxxfish (talk) 12:52, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
  • Have easily identifiable session boundaries to help denote talks which span multiple slots
  • Have recently updated sections of the schedule clearly marked as so.
  • Offer the ability to subscribe to SMS notifications / reminders for scheduled talks & workshops. Ideally this would handle changes & notify in case of any conflicts. e.g. "The talk on "Project Awesome" has been rescheduled to Sat 1st at 18:00 on Alpha stage. This conflicts with an existing reminder for the "Other Interesting" workshop starting at 18:30. A reminder has been set for both events."
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