We've been merrily hosting our monthly meetup for #LocalhostPER for a few months now and continuously improving the experience more and more each time (well, that's what we're hoping!). We've been trying out a few different things along the way with the aim of making it a welcoming, valuable and enjoyable event for all who attend.

For the past couple of meetups, we introduced some (very) simple post-talk cards for peeps to fill in. We didn't want to make it too much of an imposition to everyone's pizza-eating, beer-drinking, conversation-having flows, so kept the questions deliberately brief and simple:

  • One awesome thing I learned
  • I'd like to know more about
  • I nominate [ name ] or myself [ name ] to speak at a future Localhost event

We've been getting some seriously sweet responses that will absolutely help guide us in delivering what you, our audience, wants, rather than basing everything off assumptions.

From Kristy Haines' "Design Thinking" talk in March and Simon Fryer's "How to be a better developer" talk in April, we were able to validate that our attendees definitely learned some positive things. We'll be sharing this feedback with our speakers as well so that they can see what the main takeaways were from their talks - awesome, right?

Here's an idea of some of the feedback received from the cards:

  • "People want things to be better. Put out the call and if it's a cause they care about, they'll come"
  • "EMPATHY!"
  • "The term 'Design Thinking'"
  • "Crazy prototypes are OK"
  • "Young men's project"
  • "Empathy is important"
  • "Design isn't always about designing"
  • "Embed into workplace to learn task - Empathy!"
  • "It was great to see that the term 'design thinking' is more than just a buzz word"
  • "Figcaptions. Going to use them in my next project!"

Yessah! Thanks for all your comments, people. We've also noted down what you'd like to know more about, along with the speakers that you've nominated, so we're going to be actively working this feedback into future events.

To anyone else attending, running meetups or keen to present a talk in the future, this kind of pulse feedback provides really excellent validation that is simple, but actually quite valuable.

For the perspective of our speakers, they can be assured that everyone in the room is there with the intent to learn something, and it's pretty much guaranteed that each and every person will walk away learning at least one thing new. It's impossible not to when an open mind meets a new and different perspective.

We'd love to hear even more suggestions from you all in future. If you have more thoughts to send our way, please don't hesitate email us.

Thanks for listening, learning and being awesome, peeps! See you at the next event.

Peace!

Patima and the team at Localhost.