2015 Feedback about international-day HOT 1 OPEN

Hey there,

OK I'll bite 😁 I organized the Paris edition of the 2015 NID.

What went well?

As usual, local org, catering, venue, etc. all went well.

What did you love?

The usual stuff we get at NS Paris: the energy, the vibes, the attendees' feedback, the serendipitous encounters…

What should we do again?
What could we do again?

A single day with as many events as possible certainly is nice.

What went wrong?

Last year it didn't really differ for us from any regular NS Paris (see further down). Not enough coordination AOT with other events in close TZ's, I'm afraid. We also failed to monitor our Twitter account for hollers from other chapters, and because of that let the ball drop on a couple nice invites to remotely participate on code/hardware interactions with them (my bad, sorry!).

Generally we didn't prepare for the international side of it, we just ran a regular session on the common date.

What could we improve on?
What should we improve on?
What was missing?

There really needs to be a well-defined set of channels (or even a single channel, e.g. Slack, Gitter or whatever) for people in near TZ's to communicate during the day. This is true for attendees and organizers both, but organizers in particular, in order to do last-minute syncing of stuff.

AOT discussions with TZ champions and chapter owners is certainly warranted in order to try and put together a few common happenings, be it through videoconferencing (Talky? Skype? Hangouts?…), remote API calls into public servers run at the session venues, PR code reviews of projects developed during the day in the open, or what have you.

Sharing pictures throughout the day in a common spot (e.g. Flickr pools per TZ or global, etc.) would be a great way to commune, too.

A good understanding of the other sessions in near TZ's (exact schedule, chapter owners contact info, intended tasks / format / size, etc.) would be good as well. Sizes and formats vary wildly from one chapter to the next, I gather.

from international-day.