Here's the 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: BALUG: LVM on LINUX by Michael Paoli 2005-05-17

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 'em ... just remember to change the date/title line (or leave it blank and fill it in or update it as/when appropriate). Hey, maybe at some point BALUG will be so popular and overrun with potential presenters, we'll have to thin 'em 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 8.7 9 5 10 10,8,8,10,10,5,9,8,10,9,9,,, F 7.5 8 5 10 8,8,7,5,10,5,7,7,10,8,8,,, V 8.7 9 6 10 8,,8,10,6,10,8,,10,9,9,,, M 8.2 9 3 10 7,9,8,10,3,10,7,9,10,9,8,,, R 8.2 9 3 10 9,7,8,10,3,10,7,,10,9,9,,, K 9 9.5 7 10 9,8,7,10,10,10,9,,10,10,7,,, E 8.4 9 3 10 8,8,10,10,3,10,7,,10,9,9,,,

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 (<>):

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? ___ does Know I don't know enough to know!

examples/demonstration presented? ___ Make members learn you in control <this may possibly have been intended to be associated with the item below, but the writing looks mostly alongside this item>

What do you think were the worst things about this presentation? lack of Depth One thing: Michael talking to quickly + softly Pacing and organization No microphone A BIT DRY. No Mike will change! Mike needs a Mike so he won't shout himself hoarse. It was a bit over my knowledge Above me - Some digressions caused by members of the audience went on too long

What do you think were the best things about this presentation? lVM on 1 Hd giving Knowledge of LVN + its brethren Content + knowledge PRojEctoRs, Demo INFORMATIVE. doesn't read from display LVM is very useful topic - I learned alot of new things Above me <literally as ditto (") marks from comment on the item directly above it>

Please provide any general comments on how you think this meeting and/or presentation could be improved or should be changed: Need a mike Microphone rehearse it first <starting here ...> Repeat questions from Audence Shorten Talk & Demo To less Then 75 min. <... and through here, was written on back, so precise item association is a bit ambiguous> You could have used screen to have all your terminals in one window

Anyway, ... I'll comment a (brief?) bit on some of the non-numeric feedback/comments ... I think the (lack of) microphone comments pretty much speak for themselves ... hopefully we'll have that covered for next presenter (at least have it available if needed/appropriate). ... less than 75 minutes, ... talk + demo was actually significantly under 75 minutes. I think it was only a moderate bit over an hour, ... talk, etc., started at approximately 8:05 P.M., and I believe Dick called "time" at approximately 9:05 or 9:10 P.M. Seems we might be able to have a bit more time available for presentation, question and answer, etc., if we can tighten up some of the meeting logistics scheduling. Most notably, I note food doesn't seem to get served until about 7:30 P.M. It's then a bit after 8:00 P.M. (about start of food arrival + 35 minutes) when folks are winding down sufficiently on their eating, that seems presentation can start fairly well. (my observation/theory that folks pretty much get to visit/talk/chat from arrival up to presentation time (and after presentation) - folks manage to still talk pretty well through dinner ... so, ... if food arrived earlier, I'd think folks would still get adequate time to visit/talk/chat and such, and then there could be more time for presentations and such). Anyway, ... perhaps if we're able to get folks to show up a hair more on time (we seem to be doing pretty good on that presently), but more notably, get the food coming sooner (e.g. be able to better estimate probable attendance earlier, so the restaurant can get the first plates of food delivered sooner) ... anyway, maybe there's some way of tweaking how that works :-). Also, if food starts arriving earlier, that might also help work as an incentive for folks to arrive in a bit more timely manner too (particularly those more towards the straggler end of the time range). Anyway, ... just some of my thoughts on tweaking timing a bit. screen(1) - I didn't seriously consider screen(1) for several technical and practical reasons, e.g.: I needed to switch among GUI and non-GUI (e.g. xterm) windows, I wanted to be able to go quite directly to specific contexts (e.g. superuser (root) vs. non-superuser vs. various GUI windows), with X (and window manager I was using) I could title windows to distinguish them (e.g. "demo" vs. "demo#") hence selecting from menu the window title and raising and bringing focus to that window in a rather quick and efficient operation (e.g. Alt-F4, mouse movement or arrow keys, <RETURN> or mouse click, and I was to any window, and it would be raised and in focus - allowing me to switch among arbitrary X windows, without additional steps to switch among windows within screen(1)), screen(1) isn't useful for switching among sessions with different sized (geometry) screens (varying numbers of lines and columns) ... though what I mostly used for demo/display happened to have matched lines and columns, my more densely packed notes for guiding me through the presentation had significantly more lines and columns (reducing the movements and additional steps I needed to do in that window - whereas the presentation window's were optimized for projection readability). Otherwise screen(1) is a great tool, ... and I do use it a lot (heck, have two screen(1) sessions open, each with multiple windows within them, at home as I'm typing this).

And, ... strange things one can do with statistics, ... If we look at averages, I beat the food/service cold ... as did everything, really, ... though the food/service still had a respectable 7.5 average. On the other hand, the time/location trumped almost everything - I beat it in one category and tied it in another, and it beat me on the rest. Of course, for time/location, there's also the self-selecting sample set phenomena (e.g. those who have problems with the time/location don't show up to take the survey).

Well, ... enough commentary/analysis on evaluation data ... at least at the moment and from me.