Disclaimer: This is a follow-up post on the prior blogpost reporting about the actual Community Meetup in Berlin. Most of this is originally taken from the blog of my mentor (and probably the best) Michael Kohler aka Mexikohler. You can check it out here.

On the 21st and 22nd of February 2015 we held the annual Meetup of the German speaking community. With this blog post I’d like to share the opinions of the participants, so others can benefit from our experience.

For the following graphs, 5 is “perfect” and 1 is “bad”.

Overall

Overall we got quite good feedback for the whole event. Most of the attendees were happy with the meetup. This is also reflected in the work all contributors have done since the meetup. There are certainly a few things we can improve, but it’s good to know that it wasn’t a failure.

Discussions / Breakout sessions

For the general discussions the overall feeling is reflected again.

The breakout sessions were quite short. This might be one point attendees didn’t like about it. But since we’re over “3” on average, there is no need to complete question our format of the breakout sessions.

Organization

Thanks to the great organizational help from Hagen Halbach, we could achieve our goal to give participants as much information about the event as possible before they traveled to Berlin. 78.6% saying that it was “perfect” says a lot. Thanks again to everyone who was involved with the organization!

Even though we shifted almost everything right before the event (on Saturday morning), the participants were happy with the time management.

Location / Food

Since almost 93% answered that the Mozilla office in Berlin was suited for the event, we will probably do it there the next time too. This might change if we get a lot of new contributors and grow a lot. The biggest meeting room was full during our general discussions, so it might be worth to have a look at any other bigger venue for more people.

The same goes for the food format we used. We had deliveries twice and went for dinner in a restaurant on Saturday. With more people delivery might get more confusing and might not work as well. We also got a feedback that next time we should consider to have one order per person instead of doing a “buffet” style lunch as we did on Saturday to meet everyone’s taste.

Other input

There are also a few text inputs I’d like to mention here:

• We should have talked more about Social Media
• Localizer group was small, important people couldn’t come to the meetup
• Community Building topics might be quite hard for technical people
• We could do daily logistics emails to all participants
• “It would have been great if everyone could’ve [sic!] given their input on topics. A few contributors were not participating in discussions which lowers the quantity of valuable input.”
• The presence of the few Mozilla employees were valued, even though a few people would have liked more input from the volunteers

Thanks to everyone who was involved and a huge shoutout to the probably best German-Swiss Duo Mozilla has, Hagen and Michael! The meeting wouldn’t be possible without you!