2015-05-11 All-Hands Meeting Retrospective
- Renata McCoy
- Matt Hoffman
- Philip Jones
Owned by Renata McCoy
Retrospective
This is a retrospective on the All-Hands Meeting last week with the aim to improve on the next All-Hand meeting. Please note what you liked and did not like about the meeting, what you would like to see improved, where did you feel like there was not enough time or if there was too much time spend on something, or maybe something did not get covered that you would like to see added to the next meeting.
If you are agreeing with the statement already here, just add '+1' at the end of a statement, so we have an approximate count on how many votes are for a particular item.
What did we do well?
The 'speed-dating sessions, ie pairing the different groups, were helpful. +14
- The sessions focusing on the 3 simulations were important. +2
- The group meeting sessions were also important. +5
- The poster templates were very helpful and sped-up the poster-making process. +6
- The AMIP progress summary session was helpful in that it let a large number of people know about what had actually been done and what was to be done in a live execution of the workflow. +2
- Very well organized (thanks Renata!), and the combo of talks and hands-on sessions prevented some ppt burnout. +5
- The working session Thursday morning was extremely useful.
- I liked the location, close to Dulles. Gaithersburg and Bolger Center are farther from all airports and require rental cars. +8
- I appreciate a Tue-Thurs meeting, so that Mon and Fri can be used for travel. +10
- Liked the minimization of "updates" and focus on actual working sessions. +6
- The cakes at lunch were excellent. +1
What should we have done better?
- I would have liked there to be more free time (longer breaks/lunches/dinners) which could be used for one-on-one conversations with people. +14
- More time for the 'speed dating'. +4 -1
- The oral presentations of posters were fine, however a '1-minute madness' for all the posters might be even better next time. +3
- Opposite to point above: never found oral presentations of posters particularly helpful, since there are abstracts to guide people around. Seems like a simple introduction of all posters and how they are separated in the different groups (atmosphere, ocean-ice, etc) should be enough. +3
- The poster templates were helpful, and gave a good look to the meeting, but it would be helpful to reduce the size of the embedded graphics. +1
- Sessions on 3 simulations should not be parallel, since people may be involved or have an interest in more than one simulation. +1
- Wished the poster session could be plenary instead in conflict with the workflow hackathon, so we don't have to choose which to attend. +3
- I would still like a paper schedule with times and room locations, perhaps a single sheet. People often did not know where to go, and it is inconvenient to open a laptop while searching for a room. +7
- The oral presentations could be improved. I felt that text was way too small in some cases and presenting straight from a webpage is always problematic and should be discouraged. It may also probably be the way too bright and white projection that was causing problems. +4
- Eastern time zone plus 8am start made me very sleepy +2
- Tutorials should be presented by people with more of a user perspective, rather than from developers or expert users/SEs. Sometimes too much technical detail/capabilities and less focus on actual workflows most of us use. +6
- Could have used more time in single-group sessions (though maybe as multiple hour-long sessions). A single hour went by pretty quickly. (atmosphere group could definitely have used 2+ hours) +4
- Git tutorial was aimed at far too high a level and didn't actually work. +3
- Acoustics were bad at that venue. Otherwise I liked it. +1
- Little opportunity for "tasks" to get together. Even the evenings were filled with breakouts. +1
- Some requested a "raise your hand rule" for discussions to allow those less inclined to interrupt to provide input.