With the first AVCC conference now over, here are the results of the feedback forms. Of the 65 attendees we received 32 forms back, of which everyone filled in almost every field.
We certainly learned a lot from this experience and got some great feedback on how to improve things for next year, as well as some nice comments from those who had a really good time. Thank you again to everyone who attended, and to those who took the extra time to give us this valuable feedback.
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Comments and Suggestions
We also received a lot of comments and suggestions on these forms as to how we can improve things for next year. Given our diverse audience, we feel we did a good job of catering to a wide range of interests.
There were a few people who felt we didn't appeal to their interests as much as we could have and for that we apologise. With such a vast array of applications, and levels of technical knowledge and interest surrounding video conferencing finding that balance is quite difficult.
Breakout Sessions
A suggestion which we saw from a few people was to have breakout sessions where guests could choose a workshop to join for a period of the day, thus allowing people to skip talks that were not of interest to them in favour of others. In the future we would love to do this however we hesitated this year for two main reasons:
- We asked for suggestions for topics for the conference about 3 months beforehand, however as we got no replies, we had to anticipate what people would like to learn about.
- As we were unsure how many registrations we would get, splitting the group into two or more would have potentially resulted in very small numbers.
Now we have the experience of the first conference, this idea will definitely be taken on board. Based on further feedback we will look at splitting the group at points to discuss more technical areas of video conferencing, while others look at educational applications, training end users etc. This will hopefully let everyone explore the topics they find interesting in more depth.
Desktop Solutions
Further comments included people asking for more coverage of desktop systems in general, how they may link into room systems, and ways to maximise their performance. Now we have a better idea of the level of interest in this area, we will dedicate more time next year to looking at various desktop based applications for video collaboration.
Other Ideas
There were some other suggestions as well, which we will definitely look to include. Someone had a great idea to provide a glossary of common VC acronyms to help those newer to the subject pick up key terms. For those that are not aware, we also have an online glossary. Finally, next year we will look into streaming the entire day live to web browsers for those unable to attend in person.
If you have any further comments you would like to add, or ideas for next years conference PLEASE post them here. To do this log in to the website with your AVCC account, or create one here. Once you have done that, come back to this post and you will see an 'add comment' form at the bottom of this page.