Montreal Tech Watch

With Bolidea and Alok Mohindra (Arkalumen), we did a poll on how the last FreeHackers meetup went, to see how attendees felt about the event, the structure, if they liked it and what we could do to improve.

(see original report here)

You can see the public results of the poll here.

Here’s one thing: everyone who answered the poll had a positive feedback about the event. I won’t say rave reviews, but it’s obvious to see that everyone who was there liked FreeHackers.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect — from an organizer’s point of view, and from attendees, the most “uncomfortable” part was the scheduling. Or perhaps to better rephrase it, the lack of schedule. I did previously Blitzweekend, a weekend rally where teams would create and launch projects overnights, an unequivocal success; and I have to say that so far FreeHackers hasn’t reached that level of success.

We had to think about FreeHackers (hmm lots of work too I admit) and how it’s organized before doing other FreeHacker meetups, and this is one possible schedule:

• have someone present a new technology, programming language, framework or any other project he’s working 
• then have a workship where attendees could hack and try out the presented tool/framework
• this would last for a couple of hours; we’ll have also a couple of other workshops, suggested by other attendees, 
• the 2nd part of the meetup, a full 3 hours, would be left for free hacking