helm summit retro.md

What went well

People thought event was run smoothly

• A lot of positive feedback from attendees about how the event was run and the content.
• Thought the flow of talks was really nice
• Continuity of the talks was spot on, good flow. Venue was awesome. Probably best tech event I've been to.
• liked that the talks weren't too long
• liked the willingness for everyone to jump in and help
• Venue was great, really positive vibe, great to interact with so many people passionate about Helm
• Really liked the vibe of the whole thing. "At Kubecon you felt anonymous, here you don't"
• loved the vibe and venue, i think the vibe reflected that the core team are good people
• I liked that it wasn't too structured, no paid event staff

High engagement with attendees

• Liked the diversity of opinion, in general vibe was really welcoming and good
• Liked hearing the stories of all the different people and teams running Helm.
• Liked seeing members of k8s community not usually in k8s app dev space got to hear and see faces of these people
• I really liked the audience participation, questions were on point and excellent
• interesting to get so many questions about charts in particular (as opposed to Helm itself)
• The unconference sessions allowed some stress relief
• People seemed to like the unconference!

A lot of people showed up

• can't believe almost 200 people showed up!
• a lot of requests for another Helm summit, especially one in Europe

Excellent catering and food

• the food was good and offered a lot of dietary choices

Adam's keynote was great and Taylor did a great job MC'ing

• People loved Adam's keynote
• Taylor kept the trains moving

Good to meet lots of members of the Helm community

• Great to meet lots other folks
• Loved it, really enjoyed meeting the team

Got ideas for Helm 3

• Farina setup a follow-up meeting to CRD to further discuss the topics
• Heard a number of insightful ideas for Helm 3

What could be better

We didn't get the output from unconference that we had hoped for

• end goals envisioned in our minds didn't quite pan out with the unconf
• unconf were more about venting than user stories than we desired
• Wanted to get more concrete output and action items from the sessions
• wish we had a user story session, bunch of folks with different perspectives writing "as a X user I wish I could..." and only this, no solutions

We could have provided more structure to the unconference

• Creating and mixing topics on the spot was too hard to execute
• Lack of moderator at table lead to free for all, drowning out voices
• Have a dedicated faciliator and notetaker for each session next time.
• Combining unconference topics dilluted/hijacked session ideas. Have a faciliator moderate next time.
• Set some ground rules for sessions to keep discussions reigned in, establish moderators, etc
• Wish we could have pre-seeded the sessions more, like voting on sessions
• Should have allocated more time for the unconfs. 30m for unconfs were too short. People were just getting settled when they ended.
• allow attendees to add unconf ideas throughout the day with a board in the back and then have a voting session
• Some topics ended up duplicated
• Should have voted for unconfs at least
• for conferences, either break down topics by personas or high level topics
• helm 3 proposals seemed more academic than practical

Outside political issues and vendors

• outside (the conf) political issues in Helm/Kubernetes crept in and caused some friction
• A lot of tool operators and their products/politics crept into conversation

We might have underserved folks looking for specific discussion of Helm 2 and Helm 3

• More high level topics: charts, helm 3, CRDs. that table can then subdivided
• We didn't capture remaining opportunities for helm 2.x train
• Could have steered a session about new requirements for Helm 2.x

Lack of attendee diversity

• a lot of dudes, not a lot of women. not sure what to do exactly. We did try to do a lot of outreach

Some logistical problems

• wifi sucked (although it did keep people off their laptops)
• was cold the entire time
• projector was fuzzy
• we don't know how the livestream worked or if people watched it
• Wish we had worked out organization of floorplan and flow in advance
• we should consider talking to CNCF about helping to plan helm EU (if we in fact do it)

Action Items

• Document helm user personas in sig-apps (farina)
• Create user stories out of session notes (butcher and farina)
• Should send out a survey to all attendees -- would be good to get interest in helm 2 vs helm 3 (Lachie)
• Need to communicate what's next for Helm 2/3... (Taylor to take point)
• Set a reminder in 1 month to talk about EU helm summit (Taylor)