UDS Karmic remote participants: we want your feedback
We are a large community, but only a small number of people can travel to attend UDS in person. So, over the years, we’ve experimented with different approaches to enable remote participation in UDS. If you participated in UDS remotely (for example, using the audio feed, IRC, Gobby, etc.), please tell us about your experience by filling out this survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=1HYiY7yv7f3_2b2EXcFhsecg_3d_3d
If you registered to attend in person in Barcelona, you’ll be receiving an email with a (different) link to the (same) survey. Please use that one instead, so that we can easily sort feedback from local and remote participants.
We'll see | Matt Zimmerman 
Hey matt,
I filled out the survey, but almost gave up immediately due to its near total irrelevance to me. I really appreciate that you’re looking for feed back from remote participants, but I have no relevant feelings about things like restaurants or social opportunities.
The more choices you throw in there that are irrelevant the more likely the respondent is to go down the line not putting thought into their answers, giving you meaningless data.
Next time around, use a directed survey (ie it changes depending on your answer to the remote question?) or just two completely different surveys. I think you’ll get more interesting results…
andrewsomething
May 29, 2009 at 16:21
Yes I agree, was this the correct quiz? It only had like two questions to do with remote participation.
Andrew
May 29, 2009 at 16:55
Thanks for the feedback. With the tool we used, the only way I saw to redirect the flow of the survey was by skipping pages, and that would have required dividing up into more questions and more pages, which I thought was a bad tradeoff.
Having two surveys would have made it unnecessarily complex to combine data for the common questions (which were almost all of them).
We will slice the data such that any erroneous data from remote participants won’t cause any harm.
Note that we *do* want feedback from remote participants on some of the location-oriented questions (e.g., if you were unable to attend because it was too far away, as opposed to other considerations, that’s interesting to know).
Where the question truly doesn’t apply, there’s an appropriate non-answer (e.g. “I didn’t use it” or “not important to me”)
mdz
May 29, 2009 at 18:34
The location question is a good example. I used “I didn’t use it” or “not important to me,” but if questions were more directed at remote participants, I might have had more to say.
Either way, I’m glad to see efforts like this.
I’m most interested to see the difference between remote and on site participants on the “productivity” question. I’ve tried to do the remote participation thing for the last two UDS’s. While I love that it is availiable, I personally still feel mostly like a spectator. Not very productive…
andrewsomething
May 30, 2009 at 01:20
Rather than create two separate surveys, there is a single survey for everyone. Just disregard or answer neutrally for questions which don’t apply to remote participation.
mdz
May 29, 2009 at 18:25
Hey! Took the quiz there was only one question (length of session iirc) I asked myself, “hmm I am not sure how to answer that”, but I just checked what I thought and clarified in the comment box.
This was my 1st UDS and I felt engaged in the process. I followed the Community Track for the most part and those folks did a great job at soliciting feed back from the IRC folks IMHO.
I was dragging by Friday from getting up at 0230EST but in the end it was worth it. :-D!
Thanks!
akgraner
May 30, 2009 at 14:03