User Session Choices
After talking to a few other people I plan on going with/meeting up with at Drupal Camp LA, we all seemed to arrive at the same 2 questions, “Why isn’t there an easy way to see the sessions another user chose?” and “Why can’t you see all the users signed up for a session without refreshing the page”. Is this for privacy or just not something not considered previously?
I submit that it would be great to be able to see all the sessions a user chose and all the users signed up for a particular session for the following reasons:
- Allows you to see (and perhaps pick sessions based on) what other friends/peers/users you agree with have picked as session choices.
- If I see a session that is extremely popular, I might be more interested in going as it may hold information that’s useful, or coincides with popular trends that I may be currently unaware of.
- I am going with other people I work with, so to maximize our learning, we may choose sessions that the others didn’t so that we can meet up later and discuss what we learned, that is if more than one important event is going on at the same time that we all want to learn from.
Just an added fun suggestion that I (along with a few others) felt would be useful, otherwise, I love the site and am extremely excited about going to another Drupal Camp LA!
Thanks,
Wayne Ingraham
www.linkcreative.com
- Login to post comments
One of the reasons
I’d asked about why you couldn’t see all users signed up for a particular session (& even noted it as a bug, initially). It seems that the block that displays the users per session is a fixed size.
Thank you for the suggestions, though. We’ll be soliciting even more attendees’ suggestions after this one is over to make next year’s even better! So stay tuned for that.
Great ideas
Tom Boone gave a talk at DrupalCamp LA 2009 about some of these ideas. See http://2009.drupalcampla.com/sessions/social-scheduling-and-personalized…
DrupalCampLA.com Design Goals
Primarily I designed it to emulate 50 people standing around a white board with a bunch of post-it notes. If you’ve been to an actual barcamp, you get the idea. The main problem at barcamp is the similar. Scheduling sessions requires the organizer to match interest in sessions with varying sized rooms. A Barcamp is smaller and the organizer says something to the effect: “Who’s interested in session topic X” and a bunch of people raise their hand. That topic written on a post-it is then stuck on a schedule grid in a room that will kinda-sorta-mostly fit that number of people. At DrupalCamp LA 2007, we had about 100 people or less each day and that’s how we rolled. It was lots of fun.
In 2008, we had 300 people attend the LA Convention Center for DrupalCampLA. We knew it was going to be bigger, and we built a site with a schedule on it. But it wasn’t the same. We had more people and no way of gauging interest. Keep in mind, this is all run by volunteers – including building and maintaing the site. We have jobs & projects.
But the major problem I found came from scheduling. That year was more like a conference and rooms were scheduled prior to the camp. But we had no real gauge of interest, just our gut feel. IOW, the question of “who is really going to show up for a session?” was not known until you had 300 people shuffled between 300 rooms. So there wasn’t a way of moving them. I presented two sessions that year. One was in a huge room capable of fitting 100+ people – and I had maybe 40 people attend my session. The other session was in a smaller room that would fit ~50… and there was standing room only, people out the door, and people that decided to go be comfortable in another room.
So in 2009, I wanted to emulate the experience of a smaller venue with the real-time capabilities of Drupal – and we wanted to do this without a lot of custom programming. The main goal I had with a camp of >400 people was to be able to emulate the organic feel of DrupalCamp LA that only had just over 100 people in attendance. If you attended last year, you may recall that the schedule radically changed during lunch last year. The entire schedule slid back by 30minutes to allow for a longer lunch. In addition, we had presenters change rooms on the fly in order to best accommodate attendance.
So while it would be nice to have the ability for friends to share schedule with other friends… there isn’t (or wasn’t) a plug-n-play module to solve that problem and the problem of privacy. And yes, Privacy is a concern, especially considering occasional stalking behaviour.
So we could’ve made a simple view on each profile… we felt it was not a good idea.
It also would’ve required more effort. More time. Non-paid time. And the site takes a lot of time as it is.