Feedback
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Thank you for coming to EMF 2014. Please do the following:
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Please let us know what went well and what didn't go well at EMF this year. We really do care about your feedback and we'll try and improve this for next time.
Add your feedback below:
Good Stuff
- Location
- Badges
- Variety of talks
- Showers [+∞]
- Hand washing facilities
- Parking
- Shuttle trailer to car park
- ... and shuttle to BLY railway station. Made coming by public transport a doddle.
- Power & data infrastructure - pretty much rock solid throughout! [+2]
- Speedy response of volunteers/organisers to problem resolution
- Service at the bar was good (while the drinks lasted), and it was very nice to have multiple indoor social spaces, esp for people who wanted a quieter lounge as well as louder bar.
- Floor panel roads [+2]
- String lights (cut through to showers was awesome!) [+1]
- Ability to hire tables/chairs/marquees/hay bales etc. - were all good quality, too.
- Kids workshops
Stuff that could be improved
- Buy more beer! Russ (talk)
- Toilets... 'nuff said! AndyB (talk) [+2]
- Agreed - I've seen portakabins (like the shower blocks) that containing proper flushing loos. They're much less stinky and likely to block up than the portaloos we had, which didn't always seem willing to drop their loads into their collection tanks, leading to nastiness and health hazards (even without the pumping contractor being rubbish)
- Additionally, LIGHTS in the toilets. Having to use my phone / badge as a torch to see what was going on while i cleaned off the toilet before sitting down was particularly difficult. Thinkl33t (talk) 20:05, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
- Make sure that drinking water is clearly labelled as such
- More food and drink options
- Eg. non-caffeine / low or no sugar options
- Chips!
- Jacket potato vendor
- Healthy 'green' food
- also possibly going on later, a lot of the places shut up shop quite early.
- Survey positions of lanes/tents/DKs as early as possible before items arrive and mark out.--Sully (talk) 12:06, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
- This was planned but we were let down by the rather poor state of mobile GIS software.
- Make it longer! There was loads of cool stuff I didn't have change to check out :( After all that work everyone does, it was a shame I couldn't experience it all! (Chewie)
- Visibility of presentations in tents (brighter projectors/darker tents??) (User:StuartL) [+1]
- washing points over drains/soakaway so the ground doesn't get muddy (Chewie) [+2]
- Mark out/allocate spaces for villages who had pinpointed locations on maps (User:Markp) [+1]
- Use more plasma screens in stages instead of projectors (User:Markp). Or (better, as then the speaker can point to things) black fabric shades for the screen or marquee roof
- Improved arrangements for washing and washing up (and handling the waste water from that) [+1]
- Provide sanitizer gel dispensers at water points and near loos
- Distribute and display paper schedules (even if their might be some last-minute changes) [+2]
- Much more workshop activity (more hands-on electronics and physical making) [+5]
- Do have component vendors (maybe at their cost for marquee/power/space)
- This is very difficult without a clear list of what will sell, as CPC was arranged to appear but wanted advisement (User:Stanto)
- Pick a flatter site (for ease of disabled access)
- Ask speakers for bio's to include with their abstracts. Given them an abstract length up-front instead of editing it in an ad hoc way. Confirm acceptance to speakers and workshop organisers earlier.
- Make and enforce a clear music curfew (say from midnight or 1am or 2am to 8 or 9am or 10am), to defend those sleeping from (eg) the technoevangelists and the drunk [+4]
- Loos not so near food vendors (pong + visible urinals offputting) [+3]
- stronger enforcement/signage of quiet camping area [+4]
- an explicit invitation (with clear instructions) to report Code of Conduct violations in open ceremony, brochure, Twitter, etc. We had no direct reports to Team Comfort, but several anecdotal tweets after the event -- when it's much too late. Martind (talk) 20:58, 1 September 2014 (UTC) [+1]
- quieter, less-enclosed and more spacious bar (I suffer from social anxiety when I'm closed in with crowds, so I had a very sober emf!). Jane C
- use our collective knowledge of technology to sort accessibility issues
- ring-fence money for things like closed-loop in the stages early on.
- Build some kind of working system for preventing able-bodied people from using the disabled loos and showers (radar keys that only work when the loo is empty?) Jane C
- Info desk didn't seem to have the details wrt. volunteers, so when I volunteered I was sent out and found I wasn't needed. Suggest splitting the job - having a volunteer team leader (or several, in shifts) whose job it is to know who is where and also to make sure nobody gets stuck on a gate for 12 hours (eg. rotating people to more interesting places every couple of hours).
- Also similar to this, a register of 'on call' people - excess volunteers who can deal with sudden demands for people (esp. in the case of fire I can imagine this would be extremely useful - you'd potentially need to cordon off a largish area very quickly, and that takes people. More mundane reasons would be a talk/workshop accumulating a large queue that needs managing).
Suggestions
- Ask for an optional email address for each ticket to go on your announce only mailing list. Only the person that bought the tickets got your emails and they were slow to forward them on meaning most messages were recieved too late.
- A talk (a bit like lightning talks) where people are given 5-10 minutes to share what they did with the previous event's badge. (If someone sends me the competition winners/runners up, I'll co-ordinate it) MatS (talk) 07:54, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
- Pre-paid accounts for spending money on food/beer/whatever to negate need for cash (User:Markp)
- Have a fleet of communal wheel-barrows to help people transport their stuff from car to campsite [+1]
- Stepney City Farm have a fleet of broken wheelbarrows – fix ’em, use ’em, everybody wins! (User:Andylolz)
- Or purchase some sack trolleys
- contactless payment gear for food, beer, workshops
- forewarn food vendors to expect all-day demand, not just mealtimes, so they can stock and staff appropriately [+1]
- pinboard (offline) notice board everyone can contribute to (lost property, mini event notices eg rocket launches, would like to meet.., etc) [+1]
- Ask people who want to give workshops if they'd be happy to give more than one session - the blacksmiths' output was extreme, but even giving two or three sessions would greatly increase the % of attendees who could sign up.
- Sign-ups some kind of "express preference" systems, so most people (including those who don't check email regularly) can get at least one of their top choices, rather than first-come-first-served.
- Board games tent in the evenings [+3]
- Poker tent
- Be less ambitious with badge functionality [+2]
- And provide full documentation of features/functionality [+1]
- And sample code for each function
- Perhaps a back-to-basics through-hole design that comes with soldering iron, solder and instructions?
- EMF is unlike other festivals - for a large number of people, carrying kit to/from car is impractical and security walking every car through site is time-consuming and volunteer-intensive (not to mention the fact that cars driving off site weren't walked off). Suggest that the parking area is directly next to and easily accessible from the camping area (e.g. just separated by hay bales to stop cars driving on to the camping area).
- Provide job descriptions for traffic control, parking and entrance gatehouse. Instructions were handed from volunteer to volunteer by word of mouth and whilst common sense prevailed, it would have been useful to have instructions as to what to do under certain circumstances and a list of answers to FAQs, e.g.:
- What if somebody didn't have a parking ticket and wanted to park?
- What if somebody was just dropping off - where should they do this?
- What times were shuttle buses running?
- What times the gates were open/closed?