This year, both YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe are using my survey software to administer the talk and tutorial feedback, as well as the regular Conference Survey. This is the first time I'll have run it for YAPC::NA, so the results are going to be interesting, particularly comparing them against views of both conferences.
The YAPC::NA surveys are currently due to close at the end of this week, but as I haven't had the time to send out reminders, I may well extend that by a week. So if you attended YAPC::NA and haven't submitted a response to the survey, please consider doing so. If you've lost your keycode email, please contact me and I'll sort you out a new one.
The attendees for YAPC::Europe needed no encouragement whatsoever, and the rate of submissions was staggering. Less than a day after the survey was opened in Lisbon, we had nearly as many responses as the YAPC::NA survey in the previous 5 weeks! I get that the Americans might be a little skeptical, but I was hoping for more than the 38% we currently have. YAPC::Europe responses, even after less than a week, are already over 42%! The first YAPC::Europe survey in 2006 received just under 54%, while the 2008 survey received just over 67% response. I'm hoping we can get over 70% this year, which will be fantastic.
The survey software itself is being cleaned up, and I'm hoping to be able to properly Open Source it within the next few months, as there are a lot of smaller workshops and conferences that I think may wish to take advantage of the codebase. While I'm happy to run the YAPC surveys, and collate them on the YAPC Conference Surveys website, trying to co-ordinate them all for everyone who wanted to operate a similar survey, would be a little too much work. Plus, it might help to get some feedback and patches to improve the surveys for the future.
Thanks to the organisers of YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe for letting me run the surveys for them, and thanks to everyone who has contributed to the feedback. It all helps to improve YAPCs for everyone for the future.
Update: Just to give you some hard numbers...
--------------------------------------------------- | | YAPC::NA | YAPC::Europe | |-------------------------------------------------| | Total Attendees | 284 | 331 | | Conference Survey | 108 | 141 | | Talk/Tutorial Surveys | 373 | 640 | | Open for (in weeks) | 5 | 1 | ---------------------------------------------------
When I send surveys to my users I'm happy with a 10% response rate. Which I think is the rough standard for surveys. Although a little googling seems to put that number at about 36%. I guess students are just more apathetic.
Of course, different populations are...different. Getting feedback is great and the response rate for both are great in my opinion and YAPC::EU is just astounding.
