Here's the evaluation feedback and numbers, ... or, lies, damn lies, and statistics ... depending upon one's perspective ;-)
First, this is the text that was used for the form - printed two to a letter sized sheet, and cut in half:
Evaluation Form ____-__-__ ___________________________________________________________ YYYY-MM-DD Topic/session presenter
Using a scale of 0 (worst) to 10 (best) how would you rate the following:
Meeting time and location? ___ (able to get to it, find it, etc.)
Food and service? ___ (price/value, quality, service, etc.)
This presentation overall? ___
presentation materials? ___
oral presentation? ___
presenter's knowledge of subject/material? ___
examples/demonstration presented? ___
What do you think were the worst things about this presentation?
What do you think were the best things about this presentation?
Please provide any general comments on how you think this meeting and/or presentation could be improved or should be changed:
(Optional) Your name and/or contact information:
Certainly feel free to reuse them ... I also made them fairly generic, so the blanks could be used for other meetings/events. Hey, maybe at some point BALUG will be so popular and overrun with potential presenters, we'll have to thin them out ... and objective data can aid in comparisons (also helpful for better adjusting one's guesses of what the general and specific impressions were).
Anyway, first I'll give the items letter labels, so I can have a short table reference for them (think mnemonics; if the 1st letter isn't unique, think the 2nd ... follow the bouncing *'s ...):
L Meeting time and *l*ocation? (able to get to it, find it, etc.) F *F*ood and service? (price/value, quality, service, etc.) V This presentation o*v*erall? M presentation *m*aterials? R o*r*al presentation? K presenter's *k*nowledge of subject/material? E *e*xamples/demonstration presented?
And then the numeric data: avg. med. low hi. raws L 9 10 5 10 9,10,10,10,10,5,7,10,10 F 7.9 8 7 9 8,7,9,7,7,8,8,9,8 V 8.2 8 7 10 8,7,8,8,8,8,7,10,10 M 7.3 8 5 10 8,5,8,7,8,5,6,10,9 R 7.4 8 5 10 8,6,8,7,8,5,5,10,10 K 9 10 6 10 10,10,10,9,6,9,7,10,10 E 6.3 7 0 10 7,0,,8,4,5,,10,10
Notes, etc. on the data ... any mathematician/statistician that spots an error, feel free to correct :-) ... Some of the forms had empty or non-numeric values for the numeric items, those are treated as nulls for the sample data (aren't used in calculating the average, etc.). Numeric data on the sheets and (further below) text/comments written in are my most reasonable attempts at interpreting the writing - there may be at least some ambiguity in the written data (including the numerics). avg. is arithmetic mean, a.k.a. average (add 'em up, divide by the number of items) med. is median - roughly speaking, half are above, and half below (sort the values, if odd number of items, take the middle one, if even, take the two next to the middle, and average them) ... anyone, feel free to correct me if I don't have that done/stated quite right. (median is often relatively handy for seeing where most of the values are likely clustered and/or offsetting small numbers of data points that are far from the average. E.g., if I have it right, 1,000 people, 999 of which have a $10,000 income, and one of which has a $1,000,000,000 income, have an average income of $1,009,990, and a median income of $10,000 ... this is why, for example, one commonly hears reports on median home prices, rather than average home prices). low and hi. are the lowest and highest values anyone gave. raws are the raw numeric data I did check over the raw data fairly carefully (at least to the extent I could best interpret the written digits), but I haven't double or triple checked all the other calculations (although I tried to be fairly careful, and hopefully didn't introduce error(s)). The reported results are rounded to the nearest 0.1 (all the numeric responses that were provided on the sheets gave whole numbers (non-negative integers) within the requested range).
And, the non-numeric feedback provided. I did, at least semi-intentionally, leave enough space around the numeric items so folks could write some bits of comments in there too, if they felt so inclined (but didn't explicitly ask for such there) ... anyway, some folks did write some non-numeric stuff in there (generally along with numeric feedback).
Anyway, here's the non-numeric stuff that was written in, first with the text they were (or appeared to be) alongside, and then what was written in, ... less the (optional) contact information ... I also tried to reproduce the written in text as literally as I could read/interpret it, and where I felt compelled to squeeze in a clarifying comment, I put it within angle brackets (<>). Since The Topic/session wasn't preprinted on the forms, it's also interesting to note how folks filled that in, when they did so.
Topic/session <count when 2 or more used same descriptor, and descriptor> 2 SHELL PROGRAMMING <with case variations> 2 Shell Scripting Sh Scripting Unix Shell Unix (sh) Oh! sh-- <this one may have been influenced by my describing a cover sheet I've used in the past for a packet of handout materials on this topic, where the cover sheet had "KNOW YOUR SH" printed in large block letters, with the SH aligned on the extreme right, so it rather looks like it might have gotten cut off on the edge of the page.>
Meeting time and location? ___ (able to get to it, find it, etc.) V Good
Food and service? ___ (price/value, quality, service, etc.) God To Exelant
This presentation overall? ___ Good To Exelant
presentation materials? ___ Good
oral presentation? ___ (there wasn't enough time) fair
presenter's knowledge of subject/material? ___ Good or so <written immediately after the numeric value>
examples/demonstration presented? ___ - <a literal dash in the field, no numeric value>
What do you think were the worst things about this presentation? Location at tables was awkward examples would help Time too limited - too much background noise, not a lot of visuals needs more examples, more historical perspective Hard to hear location N/A the sitting position: cramped not comfortable
What do you think were the best things about this presentation? thoroughness Thorough & concise at the same time relevance to contemporary software Good knowledge, good pace Presenter's expertise, + organization of material. some useful calls and definitions for programming and exec shells.
Please provide any general comments on how you think this meeting and/or presentation could be improved or should be changed: Should have more examples "real life" scripts would show usage and clarify how it all works Reserve space that's quieter and unseizable; visual examples Maybe more examples, but you didn't have time.
Anyway, ... I'll comment a (brief?) bit on some of the evaluation data, both numeric and non-numeric data gathered ... We were "bumped" from our regular meeting room, and thus had to meet in the main dining section of the restaurant. So, no video projection display, no microphone/PA, other noise (non-BALUG customers) in the same room, and also didn't want to have our presentation/talk too loud/disturbing for the restaurant and their other customers present in the same room. Additionally, our being "bumped" from the room was announced, including on the announce list in the evening on the day before the meeting/presentation - so that might also have scared some folks off. Those various factors may have, by their circumstances, altered how the meeting/presentation was perceived by attendees, and also altered the crowd (or lack thereof) that showed up for the meeting and presentation. There were 15 at the meeting (including the presenter, myself), 9 evaluation forms were collected (presenter did not complete a form). Though meeting circumstances and such weren't highly similar, there may be enough similarities, and a large enough data sample set to make useful comparisons between the data that was gathered in a quite similar manner at the 2005-05-17 meeting.
Other noises in the room, and lack of microphone/PA setup was a fair bit of an issue, but perhaps not as much of an issue at the 2005-05-17 meeting. At the 2005-05-17 meeting, we had three tables of people, roughly 24 or 25 total at the meeting, and the most distant table was a fair distance from the podium, so at least proportionally, there were more comments/complaints etc. about lack of microphone at the 2005-05-17 meeting. At the 2005-10-18 meeting, we managed to squeeze around 2 closely placed tables for the presentation/"talk" portion of the meeting, so it wasn't so bad - but still could have been significantly better. In the written evaluations, at least 2 of the forms received mention issues with background noise and/or couldn't hear, and there were also comments during the talk about difficulty hearing the presenter.
Examples - lack of projector (and microphone) certainly played a significant part here. It wasn't feasible to try to do microphone-less talk over two tables, and also cover showing the screen of a single ordinary laptop to about 15 people, so, since the talk was the more crucial part of the presentation, and web materials covering most of the other material was to be made available a bit later, examples were mostly (or entirely, depending how one measures) missing from the presentation/talk at the meeting. This would also account for the wide range in evaluation feedback regarding examples/demonstrations presented. The written comments typically asked for or suggested presentation of more examples, and the numeric ratings covered the full range from 0 to 10, with two null responses on that item (and no null responses received on the collected forms for any other item which asked for a numeric response). It might be viewed that the 0 may have pulled the average down a fair bit (compared to if it had been a null), but looking at the difference between the average and median, it may not have made that much difference. That one even literally put a dash in for the numeric rating, is relatively indicative of examples being mostly missing, or not applicable (none given) - at least at the meeting itself and the presentation at that time.
The differences in values and sample size may not be large enough in many cases to be statistically significant, yet comparing to the data from the 2005-05-17 meeting I note that the data seems to indicate or hint that: meeting time and location is quite good for folks (but again, we may have the "problem" of the self-selecting sample set - those for whom it's not good don't show up to fill out the evaluation form), food/service may be slightly better in main dining area, but ratings are close enough, difference may not be statistically significant, folks liked the LVM presentation a bit more than the shell presentation, folks liked the LVM materials somewhat more than the shell materials, folks liked the oral delivery of the LVM talk somewhat more than the oral delivery of the shell talk, folks significantly preferred the LVM examples/demonstration to the (lack of) examples/demonstration on shell. Its difficult to estimate accurately how being bumped from our "regular" room into the shared dining area may have altered these various outcomes.
Not that it would make a huge difference, but also, due to our being bumped, I didn't have the set-up time I otherwise would have expected to have, and also the "announcements" business bit of our meeting went on a bit into some discussion - so between those two items I probably lost about another 10 minutes of presentation time - something that can be, and may have been fairly significant - particularly with a presentation that's already a fair bit of a squeeze to do in ~75 minutes (I think I did it in <~=70 minutes - I'd targeted my timeline more towards a minimum of about 75 minutes, and hopefully a moderate bit more (particularly more Q&A and mini-demos and examples at/towards the end). With the physical arrangements and no projection screen, and somewhat more delayed start and no set-up time, the tail end was mostly just a bit of Q&A, without really getting to show examples or any mini-demo(s)).
Well, ... enough commentary/analysis on evaluation data ... at least at the moment and from me.
References/excerpts:
similar data collection and analysis from 2005-05-17 meeting: http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-admin-balug.org/2005-May/000032.html 2005-10-18 meeting, announcement, reminder announcement, and "oops we're bumped" announcements, respectively: http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-announce-balug.org/2005-September/000... http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-announce-balug.org/2005-October/00004... http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-announce-balug.org/2005-October/00004...