PGConf.DE 2024 was last month, the feedback is now closed - time for a review.
Overall feedback
There’s always good and not so good, overall the feedback is very positive.
In addition to the feedback from attendees we also had an internal review meeting in the team and identified a couple of small details which we can improve next year. There are however some things which we can’t change, like where the venue is, prices in Munich, or how the venue is designed. We of course take such comments into account when looking for the next venue, but the good options in Germany are unfortunately limited.
Let me quote a few comments from attendees, and add a few words:
High quality of the presentations
Good choice of topics
Speaker’s presents were very cool
Interesting talks, overlapping one with the other, and maybe too many talks in German
Too many interesting presentations at the same time
A conference is only as good as the speakers, and the program committee did an excellent job selecting selecting the speakers. Thank you!
Very good catering, good service, very good organization, good location
Perfectly organized, good location
Food was exceptionally good
Organization, location, people, everything
The choice of venue could have been better. Otherwise, it was a great conference.
Overall the venue was a good choice.
Social network animation was quite low, nearly no pictures from the speakers
This is unfortunately something which is not unique to PGConf.DE: we seem to do a bad job at posting live about the talks, speakers and the conference. We have a Mastodon account but didn’t do a great job announcing it.
Making it one day longer. The rest is great!
Make it 2 days record the talks
A second conference day with more talks
Even more content spread over two days
Two days, less parallelism.
We hear you! You all want more conference days! We are working on that, but no promise!
Short 10 minutes talks
If we do 2 days we can consider a Lightning Talk Session.
No issues with internet
This is still something which needs to be pointed out (in a positive way) in Germany.
Venue
The conference took place in the Marriott Munich City West. That is a nice location, near the middle of the city, and not far from the main train station. It has plenty of space in the event area.
The hotel is built halfway into a small hill, and the conference area is in the -1 level. The large conference rooms do not have daylight, but the main floor has. One can walk down from the lobby to the conference area.
The food and beverages during the conference have been good and very tasty. So good that I almost forgot taking pictures.
Talks & Presentations & Slides
We asked all speakers to upload the slides for their talks.
When you go to the schedule, you see a “Slides available” under each talk where the speaker uploaded slides. Out of 27 talks, 22 presentations are available.
Overall attendees find that the conference content is very useful.
I uploaded the opening and closing slides, which include participation numbers and more future events.
Italians
I want to share one quote by an attendee from Italy:
Italians go to the German conference, after inventing the thing.
It’s true, the Italians started all of this, back in 2007 with the first Italian PostgreSQL Conference in Prato.
But they no longer have their own conference.
Website
We need to do a better job with the website though:
Site colour scheme makes my eyes bleed
That one is on us, sorry! We promise to do better next year!
Job board
The job board is well appreciated, both by companies looking for new employees as well as attendees possibly looking for a new job with and around PostgreSQL. We will keep the board.
Attendees
This was a bit surprising for us, we did not expect so many attendees with a “engineering/technical” background, we also expected a larger percentage of “Decision maker”.
It’s definitely something we will take into account for 2025, and will let the talk selection committee know.
Overall we had 269 confirmed registrations, some of them literally coming in last minute, or signing up in the morning.
For the past couple of years every conference has a record number of attendees.
Most visitors came - naturally - from Germany (189), followed by Switzerland (12), Italy (10) and Austria (8.) There are more numbers in my closing slides.
Next year
Note that the following graph is feedback from attendees, not a promise where the conference will take place next year.
There is a strong preference for Hamburg and Frankfurt/Main, followed by Berlin - and Munich again!
Restaurants
I have a separate blog posting about the restaurants we visited for the Organizers Dinner and on Friday evening.
Bottom line
As organizers we are very happy with the outcome. Successful conference, good talks, record number of attendees, no big complains.
See you all next year!
Other blog postings about PGConf.DE 2024
- Stefan Fercot: Back from PGConf.DE 2024
- Christoph Berg: PGconf.de 2024 in Munich
- Andreas Jobst: Current trends in PostgreSQL - insights from PGConf.DE 2024
Comments
With an account on the Fediverse or Mastodon, you can respond to this post. Known replies are displayed below:
Note: This will load data from mastodon.social.
Learn how this is implemented here.
Share: