Yeah, to go along with John’s comments, filtering by speaker was waaaaay to painful in SurveyMonkey. I hope to never repeat that experience again. It took us a few months to enter the paper surveys into SurveyMonkey then like another month before one of us bit the bullet to set up the filters and print out the data in a PDF for the speakers.

you just give everyone a link? THat’s a good idea, we do use survey monkey for our random “What do you think” survey’s. in our fat fingering days, we input the data into a survey monkey survey.

My only real dislike was it was a bit of a pain to give speakers feedback, we had to go in and filter on each speaker.

just a quick note – I use survey monkey for all of my conference surveying — quick, cheap, easy, cool.

That’s definitely something we can look at. My only counter to that is we still want to provide a value to our sponsors. Their materials on a USB drive, even if only in their (or our) minds, has more chance of being seen that if on a seperate media in the cloud. Unless we embed their materials in the survey.

We’ll definitely look in to more media-less options, we’re not tied to the idea at all, so it’s a very valid question.

Too funny that some one was worried about the drive containing malware, that’s a valid concern, and one I never really thought about. very interesting.

Thanks Harry!

A lot of speakers and attendees do prefer to just have URLs. It’s definitely an option we should look further into. Especially now since the videos of the sessions themselves will be online. Who wants the slide deck when you can watch the vid, right?

And I’m all for medialess software. 95% of my PS3 games are downloaded from the PlayStation Network, bypassing media all together. I do, however, love the music CD and movies on Blu-ray Disc. I’m not 100% green yet. I would be accept the only way to get the “extras” is with the discs sometimes.

What if instead of a thumb-drive, you handed out a similarly sized plastic card with a URL printed on it? It makes it much easier for me to copy the URL so that I don’t lose it, and it makes it less expensive for you to hand them out. You can update all of the URLs at once, even after you hand them out! I can take the URL, and paste it into my “Todo” list or my calendar to make sure I don’t forget to fill out the survey even if I’m separated from the handout. I don’t have to physically stick the URL into my computer, so I never have to worry about taking the URL out of the computer when I need to free the slot. When I go to the URL, I don’t have to navigate a file system prior to entering into the application. And finally, since the URL is physically printed on plastic, you still get to put something in my hand that I can’t ignore.

By the way, somebody at 360 asked me if I thought it was safe for them to put the USB drive into their computer. I smiled and said “yeah, I think you can trust John and Tom.” I guess not everybody even gets past that hump right away.

I’ll leave you with a survey question of my own: What would be the environmental achievement if we were to be a part of creating a world where software is not accompanied by physical media at all?