Results are in for the WordCamp Toronto 2013 Feedback Survey! Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill it out. We’ve summarized the highlights and responses below. (Keep in mind that we only had a 6% response rate…!)

Saturday’s Beginner Track

• Congratulations to Lucas Cherkewski, whose presentation on hiring a developer stood out as the most popular Beginner session in our feedback results. “He spoke to all people in the crowd, not just the newbies or the developers.”
• The Beginner Track itself was popular. Maybe too popular? There weren’t enough seats for everyone, so some audience members were stuck standing or sitting on the floor.

Saturday’s Intermediate Track

• Laurie Rauch’s session on child themes and Austin Gunter’s session on product development received the highest scores. Props to both of them for delivering great presentations!
• We had some issues with too much or too little content fitting into the timeslot with different sessions. Might need to do more prep work with our speakers next year.

Saturday’s Advanced Track

• Everyone’s a winner! Great reviews across the board for all our Advanced speakers.
• “Excellent sessions with good audience participation.”
• “Too general, not enough “gettin down n dirty” code talk.”

Saturday’s Watusi Track

• Good reviews for most of our presenters, but Denise Wiliams stands out with great reviews! Looks like folks got a good peek at Advanced Custom Fields. 🙂
• “Watusi offered a good catch-all outside of skills-classified sessions.”
• “Overall, the Watusi track was awesome! Please do it again :)”
• “I stayed in the Watusi Track all day as I’m an intermediate user who doesn’t get heavily into coding other than CSS. One of the sessions was totally for beginners and one was EXTREMELY technical.”

Sunday’s Workshops

• “For next time, it would be make greater use of time if all the downloads were downloaded before hand as a prerequisite or offered on a usb key to all attendees day of.”
• “This was my first wordcamp and the website encouraged us to come back for the sunday sessions. It absolutely was worth it to me. Both speakers had such enthusiasm and passion, it was energizing.”

Sunday’s Panels

• “Good discussion on the WordPress Development Panel. Probably the 2 most productive hours of the week-end.”
• “Business of WordPress, it was great listening to business owners and their experience with their many different approaches to their businesses. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
• “Having a more formal moderator present would’ve really helped.”
• “Panels were great. Was good to hear everyone’s different opinions. Not sure if it would be possible to have panels going on all day long.”

Sunday’s Clinics

• “WordPress site clinic was great but would have preferred a more technical angle like why things work or don’t work.”
• “Site clinic was not evenly paced for the number of sites submitted. Comments became generic. This session was promising but got bogged-down from the first review.”

Sunday’s Community Code

• “The passion and enthusiasm that came from this group of people was FANTASTIC. Time and time again I heard these contributors go on about how happy they were to be finally giving back, that they had never done this before, etc. Very inspiring, and so true to the WordPress community purpose! I hope there’s a Contribute2Core in each WC from now on :)”
• “Tom ran a great Contrib2Core session! He was very helpful and present.”

Schedule & Sessions

• Our “curriculum” may have had too much influence over sessions. Titles did not accurately match the presentations that were delivered. e.g. “Sessions: tough to choose a session to miss. Some were awkwardly titled and may not have delivered what was expected (but were still interesting). Four tracks was probably a good setup choice.”
• “Would have preferred a bit more clarity regarding the structure of the tracks (what to expect in beginner, intermediate, etc). (Got this feedback from my session’s participants.)”
• We need to do a better job of communicating the differences between track levels. How do we define a Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced user? Are there certain skills that each level should be familiar with?

Venue & Location

• “It was fabulous, the quality of meeting rooms and facilities in general, the Wi-fi access, and especially the parking made it easy to focus on the content of the weekend.”
• “West-end is great being near the airport. Lakeshore is easy to get downtown as desired. Humber was a great! location. Excellent facility. Generous, free, easy parking. Good common areas. Some sessions packed the rooms.”
• “Humber College South campus was a great choice. Not sure about transit access, however, being right off the hwy is nice for drivers, and great space for the workshop.”
• “Enjoyed staying there and visiting the building, a little far from the 401 since I am traveling, but willing to do it again.”
• “Overheard attendees commented that wifi passwords could have been written on the back of attendee name tags.” We’d love this as well, unfortunately wifi details weren’t available until after the nametags had been printed.

Catering & After-Party

• “Sorry for the Great, Great, Great, but I truly can’t imagine how it could be any better. A tough act to follow for the 2014 organizers.”
• “In all the food service was *very* good: quality, quantity and variety. Coffee service was awkwardly arranged with people crossing each other multiple times to get stuff.Kalamata was spot-on for location and size. Food was a little light on quantity, variety, delivery.”
• “More plain water would be great, there was too much flavored water…”
• “Lunch should have been ready at or at least close to the scheduled break time. Why flavoured water with sucralose in it? If I’d realized that’s what I was getting, I’d have had a iced tea.”

Final Thoughts & Comments

• “I wish you would go back to holding a developers-only WordCamp.”
• “I mentioned to Brent about having attended top (IT)vendor-sponsored events that weren’t half as well organized, staffed and serviced. WCTO2013 was an excellent event, from almost all aspects.”
• “A track for “content and bloggers”? Overall a great experience. Really grateful for the team and volunteers who put this together. Awesome job.”
• “Really enjoyed it and learned so much! Will bring some friends and will gladly volunteer again next year.”

Photo credit: Hash Milhan on Flickr