PHP Limburg: The Talk Proposal Survey

25 Feb 2017 3-minute read
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During our November meetup we noticed that a lot of people really wanted to do a talk. Yet they were unsure wether their subject was good enough or they did not know how to start with speaking.

To help those that are looking for ideas and / or validation for their current ideas we created a survey to gather information of what our community thinks about the current set of talks.

The results of these survey are gathered in this blogpost. We hope the results will help future speakers and other organisers.

Talk Satisfaction

Talk Satisfaction Graph

As our first question we asked how happy our community is with the talks that currently have passed the revue.
We got a positive score on this one and are very happy with the results.

Level of the Talks

Talk Levels Graph

Our second question was about the level of the talks. More precisely about the level our guests wished to learn more about.

As we can see the results here are pretty mixed. Which was to be expected. Our community is of all levels of experience. Which also leads to a mixed request about the level of talks.

We suggest for future speakers that if they want to do an advanced topic to just go for it but have a low barrier intro.

Subject of the Talk

We also asked our community what type of talks they would like to see at out meet-up. It turns out that the requested subjects are actually quite broad.

The answers start with basic PHP and deeper lever PHP f.e. the internals. Another example in this section is to go deeper into the new versions of PHP.

Besides that our community would also like to see more talks that are aimed at different frameworks and how they work. Examples given here are Laravel and Symfony3.

The third result are talks about certain techniques. Examples here are TDD, BDD and DDD. It seems our community would love to know more about the latest techniques that are on the rise.

Our final result is about different tools that the community can use to improve their development and their flow. PHPUnit is a much requested example here.

Length of the Talk

Talk Lenght Graph

Our fourth question was about the length of the talks. Most people like the regular talks, those between 30 and 45 min.

However, at our 2nd year anniversary meetup we only allowed for lightning talks. This gave way to a lot of positive feedback.

In turn we have decided that we will try to do 1 regular talk (30–45 min). Then after the break we will proceed to have 2 lightning talks.

This will also open up the path to new speakers who will feel more comfortable with presenting a short presentation.

To Slide or not to Slide

Slide or Not Graph

Our last question was about the slides. No we can see here that the majority would love to have slides to accompany the talk. Keep in mind though that this is with the mindset of regular talks.

We also noticed that when we take the idea of a lightning talk people are less concerned with having to see slides. We saw some lightning talks that exist purely with a demo and without any slides.

Raffle

We also held a raffle among those that answered the survey. We would like to thank Komma Board for sponsoring the book “Confessions of a Public Speaker”. A very fitting price for this survey.

Thank you

Lastly I would like to thank our community. Without them there would not be a PHP Limburg meetup. So, Thank you all! And see you on our next meetup!