SymfonyCon Paris 2015
3 - 5 Dec 2015
at Folies Bergère
What did you like about this event, and what do you think could be better for the next time? Leave your feedback to help the organizers know what you liked, and what could be improved on.
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I need to be a bit critical here, I'll try to be constructive though. I get that organizing a huge event like this is hard and that *shit* happens sometime, but there are some things I didn't like about this SymfonyCon.
First of all the schedule: the first day, due to security check (mainly), the organization was late on schedule right from the beginning. That's all right, things can go wrong :D but if a speaker starts his talk at 10.00 instead of 10.45 you should try to give hime his time anyway. Keep QA shorter, ask him to cut some minutes off his presentation maybe, but please please, *please* keep the next speaker and the next crowd out of the room until the end of the talk. Otherwise it will just be a mess. You will still be late on schedule *and* your talks will also be ruined by people going in and out forever. This happened for sure in track B (first talk, first day).
The second thing that annoyed me was the crowd, constantly moving out of the room *during* the Q&A sessions (specially the second day). I think this is kind of rude and disrespectful to the speakers. Off course the hosts are not responsible for the people being *rude*, but imho the should have noticed the pattern and asked the crowd to keep listening until the *actual* end of the topics (Q&A is an important part of a talk).
The last negative thing I'd like to point out, is the location. The theatre was amazing, beautiful but not quite right for this kind of event. I would have liked a more practical choice. A proper conference room is, most of the times, the best choice for a conference, maybe with seats for lunch, and tables etc etc. I don't know why that particular location was chosen, maybe there was no alternatives at all, maybe it looked *fancy*. For me, I would have preferred something like a university, an hotel etc etc.
That said, the conference was good, I enjoyed the second day in particular, great talks, great speakers.
The venue was precious... but totally not adapted to a geeks' conference! Wifi was really bad (in track B there was no wifi at all), and the food breaks were more of a war than a meal.
Having said that, quite a few really cool talks, other far less interesting, specially the very sponsors' marketing oriented sessions. It's ok to mention them, it's ok to talk a bit about them, but I felt it was too much here!
I still had fun! :) And the sfcon party was very original and well thought!
Thanks!