CommCon 2019 Feedback

We can’t thank you enough for coming to CommCon 2019 and we thought it would be good to ask you all for your invaluable attendee feedback after the event, to which we have had some great responses, thank you! All of this year’s feedback is being made public once anonymised. We think it’s only right to let the community see the raw unedited feedback from the attendees.

“It was a fantastic event and probably the best and most enjoyable conference I’ve been to. The venue was amazing, the talks were interesting (even if one or two were a bit above my head), the evening activities were fun and well-organised, and everyone there seemed relaxed and to be having a great time”

“Awesome”

“That it is the best event of its kind”

“I need to come back next year”

“Far exceeded expectations. This conference was a hidden gem. It deserves success”

CommCon is very different to any other conference in the Real Time Communications industry as its a Residential Conference. This gives you the opportunity to chat and connect with so many great people from around the world, who all come together to talk RTC, and this came across in some of your awesome responses!

“Small residential conferences can attract real experts”

“Made some great friends, potential business contacts and learned some solid info. Totally worthwhile”

“Meeting great people”

“Surprise, conferences can be really enjoyable! Getting acquainted with other folks working in the same (and other) areas in a comfortable environment”

“ Residential is the perfect format for this conference”

“This was the first residential conference I’d been to and it was fantastic from start to finish. Realistically, I’ve got absolutely no idea quite how much work is required to pull off an event like CommCon to the standard you did, but I know it can’t be easy! I’d love to see it back next year, and if there’s any way I can help out to make that a tiny percent more likely to happen then I’d be happy to do so. Equally, if you need someone to write a new web-app for the panel to completely break next year, then I’ll gladly help 😉”

One of the perks of CommCon being a residential conference is that it gives you the opportunity to do a bit of networking and talk business specifics etc if you want to either out of sessions or in the evenings. You seemed to agree..

“Networking is key”

“It encourages people to share experiences, ideas and solutions, even out-of-session”

“Great networking”

“New business partnership opportunities”

“Networking with some of the greatest minds in the industry”

“It was important to listen to the experience from other companies and listen about new technologies” “The most interesting on this event as this was a small one it was possible to talk with anyone”

“Having some time to network was great”

It was great to read that the majority of you were satisfied with the event and 86% of you thought the content of the talks was mostly relevant and helpful, which is fantastic and getting it nearly right is all down to the choice of topics that were spoken about, especially the Keynote sessions that took place.

“The Keynote speakers were very enlightening, I’d say that was probably my favourite part, the topics in particular and how they were delivered”

“Really good and useful technical content “

“Watching sessions by our industry leaders-of-thought makes this conference. Hearing the experiences of the people who help form this industry was enlightening”

“Simple bot integrations. I got ideas on how to improve some automation processes”

Some of you also thought that we could have done a little better…

“Some talks have been really interesting and were great prepared, some not that much”

“Sessions were not real life oriented, meaning that only a few actual implementation cases were discussed, and almost none business cases. It’s great to discuss open source and comms but it should have a more practical tone”

“In my opinion it’s better to have people talk about specific projects, problems that arised, solutions that were implemented, ways to scale and maintain systems, etc. because that’s where everyone spends most of their days in”

We seemed to have done pretty darn well with the glorious location choice and accommodation, what was in your Welcome Packs and in our communication prior to the event itself but there’s always room to improve! The evening activities went down a treat, but not as easy as the food! We tried this year to keep the menu a little lighter with hot and cold lunch choices and themed evenings like the Indian buffet and the Pizza night, hopefully catering to most people’s taste; but it’s difficult to get it 100% right for everyone and food is one of those things we trust the venue to take care of to a high standard.

“location was beautiful; dinners were excellent; lunches were not amazing”

“Eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same place got a little old by the end. Lunch outside the back of the conference center would have been better”

“Wish there was more time between breakfast and lunch!”

“Mostly the food was great but some of the lunch and dinner buffets just did not have enough options for my personal preference. I don’t think that’s a general feeling and I know we all have different taste”

Let’s take a look at your perspectives on how the AV was handled.

“I was impressed with how everything went so smoothly with A/V”

I don’t know if this really falls under logistics, but streaming the whole thing in 4K was a fantastic idea and I’m glad that you pushed for it. It’s really exciting to see that it is possible, and hopefully this will prompt others in the industry to follow suit!

We think the AV team did an amazing job streaming the conference sessions live in 4K and building fantastic sets with great lighting and going on your responses, so did you. Sadly you didn’t rate the conference facilities as highly.

At this year’s CommCon we tried something new by hiring a ‘Dome’ as one of our tracks and we have had very mixed responses to it. Here are some of your thoughts….

“It’s a different concept but does not provide the same level of comfort as a real conference room”

“Cool and different. Unfortunately a bit noisy so kinda hard to watch several talks back to back out there”

“It was too loud and a bit too hot from time to time”

“It was a pretty cool set-up! The light bothered my eyes a bit, though”

“It was pretty dreadful. It looked fun on the outside, but the inside was just purely unpleasant. The ambient light was far too bright, such that when the sun was not shrouded by clouds, it made it very difficult to look at the speaker, much less the slides. The drone of the air flowing made any conversations unpleasant. I have to admin that I chose different sessions simply because the first choice was in the dome”

“Was a bit hot on the first day, but otherwise proved a fantastic resource”

“It was a bit claustrophobic, I don’t really think it is a comfortable way to make a presentation. If it weren’t for the (possible) rain, it would have been far nicer to do it in open space”

We appreciate all your feedback on the Dome — both positive and negative but we’d like to try and explain some of the reasons behind the Dome in the first place and unlike some of the other points it’s something we can make actionable change on if there’s another CommCon in the future. Quite simply the conference wouldn’t have happened without the Dome. Some said a covered area outside without any sides would have been better — we agree completely but the trouble with running the event in the UK is we don’t know what the weather was going to be like — it could have rained for 4 days so we have to plan for worst case scenario. Others said it would have been better to have another conference room indoors with A/C etc; again we completely agree but none of the venues we viewed in the UK could give us what we wanted so the choice was made to have the event at a venue that ticked every box other than having two conference rooms of decent size.

Now, as you read above — some people had really strong feelings about the Dome and how it was something “not to be repeated” — we disagree and we’ll go through why and hope you’ll understand. Finding the perfect venue that allows us to run a residential conference as well as having great conference facilities, wifi, open spaces etc etc etc is a near impossible task and the Domes (or even the Cubes) open up new possibilities for which venues can support us in the future. Do we have things to learn from this year? Absolutely. Would we have that size dome again? Would we have the aircon units that close to attendees again? No on both counts!

We learnt so much this year — we’re sorry it wasn’t perfect but we hope you’ll trust us if we choose to do it again — we’ll do a lot of things differently we promise. Finding “the perfect” venue is an impossible task — Wotton House last year was perfect in every way other than one — they can’t support more numbers than we had.

Moving on we asked what you all thought about the sessions and the overall agenda. It’s a fine balancing act to get the right mix of speakers and topics so that everyone enjoys them and maybe even goes away having learnt something new. The evening activities, history talk by Helen Fry and the lightning talks seemed to have went down a storm (no pun intended). All in all your responses were mostly positive in this category!

“Lightning sessions were a great addition as was Just a Minute”

“Overall very good. I learnt a lot. Sometimes it was hard to chose which talk to go to”

“There was a good balance of talk topics catering to a lot of different interests. I don’t spend a lot of time working directly on SIP servers or PBXs, so talks relating directly to those were a bit over my head, however there was often a talk on the other track that was of interest. I’ve also got to say that ’Just a(n) RTC Minute’ was hilarious and a great idea, not to mention a good demonstration of how (no matter how much you do) users will find creative was of completely breaking everything they touch!”

“I liked the sessions and that there were some nontechnical talks throughout so I didn’t get overwhelmed with technical info. David Duffet’s talk was also really cool because it was interactive and gave advice everyone could use”

“I thought that the agenda was great. With a diverse background of attendees, I felt that the agenda had something for everyone. I also really enjoyed the lightening talks, game night, scavenger hunt, and Pipe’s robots!”

“The sessions were, overall, some of the best I have seen at any conference. It is no exaggeration to say that this is my favorite conference of the year”

“Having the conference area separated from the social events really helped setting a relaxing scene for the evening activities and social mingling”

“I loved Helen Fry’s talk on the history of the place”

Asking you how we can improve on CommCon going forward is key, as we want you to want to come back to support this event year on year. Here are just a few of your suggestions:

“I think, just a different venue. I wasn’t bad, but there were little things that made it just a bit less likeable than the one before. However, I know having a perfect place isn’t always possible”

“Get rid of the dome and have two tracks with identical setup i.e. the tables in the VoIP track were so useful. I’d get rid of the conference food and replace with more of the BBQ, Pizza type foods as they seemed to be a big hit!”

“A few more talks like David Duffet’s about speaking, perhaps about pitching your business or project. Importance and use of Community”

“I’d like to give some quick feedback after the sessions to the session. Just a short thumps up kind of feedback”

“For me personally, I’d love to see more web/JS based talks, although I understand that that may fall outside of the intended scope of CommCon. Apart from that there’s nothing else that I can think of that would improve it; I’d gladly do it all again next week!”

“Think about some kind of speaker contract as motivation to stay for the complete conference (maybe something like: if you leave earlier, you pay the hotel room..)”

“Make sure you have technical and impacting presentations”

“Time of year — July is holiday season and staff is low”

CommCon is for the Community, run by the Community and it takes the support of the Community to ensure events like CommCon carry on!

“Importance of community”

“Community is good!”

“A problem shared is a problem halved” — it’s only when you get talking to people in a more relaxed atmosphere that you realise you’re not always alone in your challenges…”

“Meeting more of the community, learning about new solutions/projects in the space”

“Connecting with people”

“Lots of community discussions”

“New and revived friendships”

“Meeting other participants”

We take your feedback onboard from both perspectives good and not so good, without it we can’t improve on any future CommCon events that take place. A lot of time and thought goes into getting what we hope was a memorable conference right and thanks to all of you who took the time to answer our questions. See here for the full list of responses. If you have any followup queries or would like to give us any feedback one to one — just let us know at team@commcon.xyz