Post event notes below, be sure to also check out:
Turnout:
- awesome, on the order of 200 ppl throughout the day
- ppl showed up at 1:45, we had 40+ ppl by 2:30, most packed was 3-6pm
- multiple rooms worked really well for hacking vs. socializing
- we had 30-40 ppl stay passed 2am till 7am
- heavy on the developer = side good thing
- about 2 dozen ppl from neighboring countries (malaysia & thailand)
- a handful of really good designers
- a dozen or so people scouting for developers
- had over 250 ppl tune into watch the live video stream
Interactions:
- twitter was widely popular throughout the event
- tweet streams on the wall was good
- cross video posting between the two rooms was good
- awesome social circles broke out in many corners
Food:
- dinner of 130 was perfect. fed everybody and provided running left overs through the night
- when we announced dinner, nobody moved that was an awesome sign that people were really hacking
- setup dinner outside (got lucky with no rain, keep that in consideration for future events)
- a mix of large chip and small chip bags did well for getting ppl snacking through the day. could have more though.
- 4.5 mini kegs of beer!
- 146 cups of joe
- 51 cans of Redbull
- emptied out all shelves of milk in a 4 blk radius to cover the demand for lattes!
- Carrefour Grocery Shopping Receipt List
Other:
- everybody loved the location, only complaint was that it too tight at peak times
- sg community is really supportive, chipping in to help with setup, network, a/v, tables, etc.
- network held strong (impressive), with 60Mbs and a few grand in donated networking equipment. Didn't need to use ethernet, but nice to have for backup.
- Meng Wong of Hackerspace cooked some awesome steak and had great posters. Would be nice to cover that in the budget next time and not ask for donations
- Pigeonhole was amazing, huge staff on hand, stayed up all night, really supportive of the community would like to do something to thank them
Projects/Presentations:
- Aftermath - Completed Projects and Lightning Talks
- about a dozen projects in total, did a 2nd round at 7am
- most projects weren't from the list we seeded, but it was nice to have and it was a good conversation starter
- some really good project ideas, and some really fun/silly project ideas, it was the perfect mix
- ran a giveaway with e27 to award the most interesting project a booth/table at Echelon 2011 (very cool) and also had consolation prizes of free tickets.
- Hackerspace offering a post shdhsg show-n-tell May 24th very cool
Hardware:
- WiFI: Zhone ADSL, Apple Airport Express, [ D-Link 10/100 Switch "A" , 3 x Colubris MAP-320.
- More info at: http://www.haller.ws/logs/view.cgi/SuperHappyDevHouseSingapore
- 2 projectors w/ highspeed laptops (remember to kill autoturnoff/screensaves),
- twitterfall / tweetwally for twitter stream. webchat.freenode.net? (need to avoid issue of too many ppl on 1 ip, webchat is important) something that could tie in twitter conversations along this?
- 8 powerstrips w/ 4 outlets, needed 5 more to handle 200 persons
Improvements for future events:
- IRC back channel - we couldn't support everybody at first and this was a big problem for matching developers with each other (see notes below)
- video testimonials booth had 0 turn out, if we want to do this again, we would need a person on the ground the entire time to invite ppl and interview them especially important when dealing with introverted developers
- something to help connect ppl, maybe allowing ppl to tag themselves (during rsvp) with programming languages, skills sets (dev, biz, student, designer, etc) One suggestion was color coded stickers (vinnie hates name tags at parties :p)
- a checkin app to go along with rsvp list (so you can see who's there and it can display their info (twitter pic, link, etc)
- had about a handful of people say they left because it was too packed and not enough seating however the tight squeeze added a great intimacy to the event
- remember to save live stream on usteam (forgot), so don't have the best footage, lightning talks are thankfully on flip.
- encourage ppl to upload photos at the event, maybe to a flickr group (a search of flickr on sunday of #shdhsg turned up zero results) maybe have a person dedicated with a card reader to upload photos for ppl this is great stuff to get out in realtime
- few power strips short, but borrowed from pivotal and pigeonhole
- lightning talks: next time, bring a timer for 5min & ask projects to emails us their name, project, link so we have it all as they come up.
Pre-event checklist reminder for next time:
- Venue (pigeonhole will be tight if attendance increases) Beer+overnight+publictransit a must.
- Sponsors
- Chairs/Tables
- Carrefour snack budget
- Drinks (beer, redbull coffee)
- Dinner
- FB event, email announcement, mailchimp signup
- Newsletter few days before
- Coverage in blogs
- invite press
- IRC: freenode has a default connection limit of 100, if more than 100 people are expected email ilines@freenode.net with the details of the event, the expected number of people and most importantly the external ip-addresses where the connections will be coming for javea property for sale. they responded within 2 hours, which is pretty fast but better to contact them as soon as the ip-addresses are known.