Published
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 3:26 PM
by
mtaulty
One of the questions that we asked on the feedback forms that we handed out at our recent Roadshow events was;
"Which topics are you more interested in hearing about at future events?"
I've no idea whether I'm supposed to share this data with you or not but I was looking at this evening and thought I would (I'll probably get shot but, as far as I can see, it's aggregate data and isn't going to identify anybody). This is based on approximately 1200 attendees to the 4 venues other than the Reading venue which we only did Tuesday and haven't got the figures back for yet.
Here's the graph;
There's no great surprises in there and I'm pleased to say that it largely lines up with what I've always suspected which is that if you want to catch most people you'll talk about;
- Tools
- Languages & Frameworks
- Data
- Client - Web and/or Windows (and Web is more popular on there right now than Windows by quite a long way)
It's not rocket science in that if you're thinking of a dev audience then everyone uses the tools, languages and frameworks and so people see this (rightly imho) as very important and interesting. It's why we spent quite a lot of time on LINQ at the recent Roadshows and we married it up with Data as well because everyone encounters data in one form or another as the graph indicates.
Don't be too surprised if our future events emphasise these areas - we're just trying to be popular :-)
One thing we did at the recent Roadshows was to take a topic that people are less interested in such as "Office" (for any Microsoft people reading this, I'm just stating what the customers are telling us here) and we blended it into the main content a little by tagging on short sessions such that;
- If you were interested in that topic then you got to hear something about it.
- If you weren't interested in that topic then you spent only 10 minutes at a time on something you weren't interested in.
- It kept the people that pay for our events happy :-)
Generally, the feedback on this approach has been quite positive and I'd be keen to know your thoughts if you saw it and thought it was good/bad/ugly and especially if you had thoughts as to how it might have been better or taken further.