The Symfony Open-source Community

Great talk, perhaps more visuals, bit more practice on talk, it's about there

I was pretty cool to hear about the Symfony community. I expect most of what you said applies to other communities too.

I think you should read out the quotes you put on the screen. Otherwise you have to wait for people to read it themselves, or they have to read it while you're talking about the next thing.

I think the main thing this lacked was focus. You talked about: things that make good communities, things that make good coding communities in particular, specific people from the symfony community and things they've done, how to behave well within communities. However points from these categories were scattered about in no particular order in a meandering fashion, so the talk didn't feel well punctuated. Plenty of good sentiment, but a lack of good structure. I'd focus more on Symfony specific aspects, and less about the nature of communities generally, as this is stuff that most people are fairly familiar with. I enjoyed hearing about specific members of the community and stuff they had done, and more stuff like that would give the talk a more tailored and unique appeal.

Enjoyed this! Maybe some real world anecdotes might enhance it by making things more directly relatable to each audience member, and not just something to academically agree with.

You were really genuine in your passion for the community, I think with the quotes it would be best to group and summarize rather than reading the whole thing, maybe by highlighting the key part of the quote in bold like you did on a few.

Genuinely heartwarming talk. Gently increased my guilt at having never contributed to OSS. My only suggestion would be to give some of the tweet slides slightly longer on screen, they shot past a bit quick to listen AND read.

Great talk, did very well for your first talk, I agree with some of the comments below that you should read the quotes, maybe provide a comment about how you feel about that quote, this will also help you gain that 10 minutes you need to make it 35 minutes.

Excellent talk, interesting and informative
Good to see non-code elements of open source being evangelised

A good call to arms talk to encourage community support. Zan’s talk was clearly fresh but showed some good potential. A few more goes through in front of the mirror should make something even better for Symfony conference, I hope it goes well.

Cool talk, liked the emphasis that contributing to a community isn't just about pr's. Liked the quotes, could have made more of an impact if they were read out. Best of luck for they keynote, you'll smash it.

I use Symfony but had not really thought about contributing. I certainly felt encouraged. Some more real-world experience stories would be of interest.

A good first talk. Confidently delivered.

Tips to improve:
- a few more rehearsals to make it all a bit smoother.
- Work out what your key messages are
- Make sure those points are clearly made at the appropriate points in your talk.
- Make sure they are summarised at the end.
- Make sure the structure of the talk supported the points you're trying to make.

With a bit of polishing this should make a good keynote.