I was very gratified with the responses. I’ve read some random comments (did you see that person who wrote an entire page of general comments?). I’m going to read all of them this week.

I’m really thinking that eliminating ratings makes for MUCH more useful feedback, and based on this, we’re definitely changing how we do things at Fairfield / Westchester. It should not be a competition — these events should just be a great learning opportunity for everyone — speakers included. Competitions are great for “Speaker Idols” (a terrific event in its own right), but if we can get feedback like this, it’ll just help everyone improve.

Just to clarify a bit — the attendees were not informed that the evaluations would ultimately be anonymous when we sent them to the attendees. Despite that, we had what appeared to be really honest evaluations. I wonder how people would respond if they knew they would end up being anonymous (I stripped out the names and email addresses before sending them to the speakers — we just used those for the raffles). Hopefully, they’d remain constructively critical. That would be an interesting experiment for next year, if we do mention this in the opening session.

I agree 1000% (yes, 10x more than what you say ) that we should ask speakers for the level and prerequisites next time. Your own abstract was great, and should be used as a model for others. As you mentioned, it does help to have an abbreviated version for posting on the wall, though.

Now that I’ve had more than a week for the event to absorb, I’m about to work on a blog post about the code camp. Of course, the way I write and edit (and re-edit), it may take another week before I post it