Pre and Post TADHack Surveys

tadhack surveyThanks to everyone for their great feedback on the pre and post TADHack surveys. A summary of the results is shown in the slides below.  We had 188 responses to the pre-event survey and 40 responses to the post-event survey.   You can see the 22 countries that responded to the survey in the slides.  The majority of the respondents were application developers and students (110 of the 188 responses to the pre-event survey).

On what people were hoping to get out of TADHack the top 3 were understanding the latest telecom tech, networking, and comparing the different platforms.  At TADHack we try to bring every telecom innovation platform provider together for this event.  All the development themes were of interest, with Telecom APIs and WebRTC being the most interesting to developers.  At TADHack we found WebRTC is a great entry point for developers to understand what communications can offer as its available in the browser.  And from that gateway developers then added telecom API capabilities that address any telephone.

One interesting data point from the pre-event survey was many developers use events like TADHack to generate business.  We plan on helping make this a stronger theme for 2015.  In the post-event survey, the number of responses was lower at 40, which is normal.

Feedback on what we could do better, in Madrid we had a WiFi problem, if we’re at the same location next year there will be fiber (we ended up on LTE and ADSL for this year’s event). More publicity is clearly required. Fairer competition reflected the variety of hacks being on show, which will be solved through grouping into two main categories of a 24 hour hackathon and a service innovation showcase for more mature services. We also had a couple of mentions in making the hacks clearer to understanding.  We will ensure everyone follows a clear template in presenting their hacks, to make it easier for everyone.

People loved the TADHack satellites and want more on them, you can see on the final slide below the list of other locations people voted for. All locations generally liked the food provided, though a couple demanded pizza and beer as it was a hackathon 🙂  On prizes, most people liked that we gave many prizes, through 20% would prefer 1 or 2 large prizes. My opinion is we keep the approach of lots of prizes to encourage as many people as possible to contribute, the ones who would win the big prizes will likely make it in the market anyway, so better we share the love as broadly as possible.

The most common feedback on what was missing from TADHack was the need for a social event after the prizes, people wanted to socialize and share after the intense event. We will plan on some wrap-up event for 2015. Interestingly people wanted to explore x-satellite teams, i.e. people in Madrid and Sri Lanka coding together on a hack. Other feedback on team composition recommended mixing telecom novices and experts to help spread the expertise in adding telecom capabilities to applications, services and business processes.

Thanks for your great feedback, we’ll be using it to make TADHack better for 2015, we’ll have some developer spotlights being published on this weblog soon – you’ll have seen some tweets about them recently, and don’t forget TADSummit on the 12th and 13th of November in Istanbul.  Together we can build the telecom application developer ecosystem.