You've likely already seen a link to the 2021 KLAS Users' Conference Attendee Feedback Form created by the KLAS Users' Group Officers and Program and Logistics Committees. With this being such a different year, it's more important than ever for us to hear from you!
In addition to getting feedback from attendees, though, both Keystone staff and the committees have each gotten together to discuss their own observations about the conference. By digging into the conference's schedule and content, as well as the PheedLoop platform, we can make sure we learn from what went wrong and take note of where we got it right.
Today I want to share some of our notes from these conversations so you know what's been our minds. (Agree? Disagree? Have thoughts on something else entirely? Please let us know--starting with the Feedback Form!)
Schedule
No schedule will be perfect for everyone, but our discussions looking back on this trended positive. We managed to offer a lot of sessions, and time them reasonably for everyone, regardless of time zone. Other ideas were discussed, but on the whole, this schedule seemed to work well for an online conference, with one exception: the month of June can be a difficult time for IRC / IMC KLAS Users to attend.
We also had split opinions on the strict enforcement of session times. On the one hand, it kept everyone on track and moving. On the other hand, it also resulted in some pretty abrupt cut-offs... as did ending sessions manually without accounting for the 10-second broadcast delay--sorry about that!
Content
We were thrilled with the amount and variety of user-proposed and user-led sessions! The Keystone staff especially appreciate the effort made by the committees to recruit and involve more users throughout the conference.
One complication we identified was that some sessions applied to more "tracks" or topics than we'd initially thought, and ended up scheduled against too-similar content. It's probably impossible to avoid schedule conflicts entirely, but one idea from our discussion was to provide a better way for the presenters themselves to identify the topics their session will cover and / or intersect with.
Platform
While we were satisfied with the PheedLoop virtual event hosting, there was definitely plenty to discuss on this front. It was a little surprising which features generated a lot of interest, and which fell flat. We made sure to consider whether that was the platform itself, people taking time to learn it, or just a matter of leaving time for it. For example, the Networking rooms were barely touched. If we want to try them again, we need to make sure there's a designated session block instead of expecting people to give up their valuable breaks to try it (especially since many people need to use those breaks to keep up on their day-to-day work).
We really liked a lot of their back-end and event management tools, but we have a long list of suggestions, feedback, and feature requests to pass on to the PheedLoop team. One strong positive: since signing on with PheedLoop, we've seen a lot of activity in terms of useful updates, so we're very hopeful that it will get better and better over time.
Final Thoughts
Virtual conferences have their pros and cons. Going online meant a lot of expanded access to new user presenters (plus other attendees) who may not have been able to attend otherwise. On the other hand, we saw mostly very familiar names, in the chat boxes and especially unmuting and speaking up in the Zoom sessions. It's impossible to replicate a lot of in-person conference experiences, but we wondered if we were doing enough to help new attendees get to know the Users' Group and feel comfortable participating.
Remember: this is your conference--so don't be afraid to let us and / or the committees know what we're doing right, what can get better, and what we haven't even thought of. We hope to hear from you!
