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# System prepended metadata

title: DevOpsDays India 2019 Retrospective

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# DevOpsDays India 2019 Retrospective

## Things that went well:

* Hiring Board.
* New organising team.
* Good to see new face as part of the organising team

## Things that didn’t go so well:

* Speaker and schedule announcement was too late.
* Too much involvement from Gojek. Need to plan better in terms of ground volunteers beforehand.
* Estimate of attendance. Need at least two people just on goodies.
* Need to look for Papercall replacement. Interface is confusing to say the least.
* Townscript has a lot of issues. Espacially modifying existing event and ticket types.
* Event dates on workshop tickets were wrong. Reason above.
* Started on many things towards the end, diversity scholarship, talk selection/rejection, publishing the programme, deciding the keynote speaker(s) etc. 
* We were late in sorting-out in everything i.e sponsers, speakers, designs etc.
* For Design too, we should start atlease 2 months before and have a dedicated designer assigned so that, even if there was urgency, we can get the designs change done.
* For goodies, we didn't have proper discussion this time and there was confusion, cuz we were busy with other things. We should have proper dicussion and finalize it before 1 months
* Workshop registration and conference registration had separate tickets. Few people thought that Workshop tickets include conference pass too. Need to manage this better or we should have one more ticket for workshop + conference.
 

## Improvements for the future: 

* Would like to rethink about diversity scholarship, am not convinced that the attendance will improve just because the tickets are available. The student scholarship makes sense, but diversity scholarship may not considering that the problem may not money. What is needed might be to work on how to improve the participation, which may not be straight-forward to solve.
* Rather than selecting the top X talks, we should select only the best talks that we feel good about. We should try to improve the funnel so that we find it difficut to reject than finding what is better to choose. 
* For speakers and sponsers, we should start as earlier as 4-5 months before the conf date.
* Should have a dedicated designers
* Should discuss goodies as early as 2 months before and finalize it before one month.
* Print the sample of each goodies and check the quality

