The grades are in! Owl Re just sent us the results of the Lift Asia 09 survey, and it seems attendees gave us good grades again despite the tough context that greatly complicated organization (remember we had a major economical crises just 3 months ago ? ;)

Owl RE undertakes an evaluation for each Lift conference to measure the successes, opportunities and potential improvements. As a new collaboration with Thierryweber.com, the findings are now available in video format. The first was created for Lift France 09 held in Marseille in June 2009. Lift France 09 explored the social consequences of new technologies with over 560 people attended the conference.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post from Jan Ondrus, a veteran Lifter who is now working in Paris and wants to pick up your brain.

Dear Lifters,
we need your help in order to diffuse a survey.

Some academic research colleagues and I are conducting a survey to assess the work-life balance (WLB) perceptions of distributed professionals in the IT sector. In today’s (globally) distributed work environment, assessing work-life balance (WLB) perceptions of employees is critical to ensuring the well-being, productivity, and commitment in the workplace. We hope that the survey will result in the identification of actionable items that will make a positive impact on the WLB of distributed professionals in the IT sector.

This survey, conducted by independent academic researchers, is designed to provide a diagnosis of the employees’ WLB (or lack of) along with relevant antecedents and consequences. Since this study is on work-life balance, some of the questions are about your “work” characteristics while others are about the “life” aspect.

We need respondents based in Europe working on distributed project ("offshored") in the IT sector (i.e., people in Europe with teams abroad). We have already collected data from India and USA. Now it is the turn for Europe.

Click here to fill the survey!

This survey has 4 sections and should take about 15-20 minutes to complete. I know it is long but we really need complete surveys. Otherwise, we cannot use them for our research. Please forward this link to any relevant person you might know. We need a fairly large number of respondents in order to be significant.

Thank you very much in advance, best regards.
Jan Ondrus
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Information Systems and Decision Sciences
ESSEC Business School, Paris - Singapore

The grades are in! Owl Re just sent us the results of the Lift09 post-conference survey, and I am happy to see we are continuing to achieve a very high satisfaction rate:

90% of attendees had a good or excellent overall appreciation of LIFT09 with “networking”, “learning” and “exchanging” mentioned as the greatest benefits of participation. The majority of attendees agreed that LIFT09 provided them with interesting information and influenced their opinions on the usage of emerging technologies. 98% of attendees met new people at LIFT09 with most people meeting between 1 - 10 persons.

Key quality factors of LIFT09 were rated by attendees with “networking” and “administration” rated higher than “programme quality” and “website”. The main formats were rated with “presentation” rated the highest followed by LIFT experience (artistic installations)” and “Workshops”. “Discussions” and “Openstage” were rated less well. The most popular presentation selected by attendees was “New frontiers” by Vint Cerf.

Attendees would like to see more presentations using cases studies and practical examples drawn from the fields of innovation, technology, art, design and architecture. Attendees would like to see fewer presentations on esoteric topics and from a design and IT perspective only. Attendees also suggested more analytical presentations and the possibility to have Q&A sessions with the speakers. 86% of attendees said they planned to attend the next LIFT conference and 97% would recommend it to a friend.

Full report (PDF, 600kb)

After each Lift conference, Glenn O'Neill of Owl RE runs an independent survey where he asks participants their impression about the event. The resulting reports are then published on the site, and we use this precious feedback to make the next year's edition better.

We received our grades from Lift Asia! Despite a quite low answering rate (due to the fact the survey was only available in English) we got some precious encouragements and recommendations for future editions. Overall attendees were very satisfied (we maintain three years average of 90% excellent or good ratings) and we achieved our goal to connect participants together:

And we got a large number of requests and recommendations for next year, like:

• coffee break? it was helpful but, too long time.
• Navigation on the website is not always clear and, because it changes frequently, things that looked
one way in the past, look different the following day.
• You should add the name of the company or institution on the badges.

And of course we have the traditionally contradictory demands who will show you that our job as organizers is never easy ;) Someone is asking for less people "just speaking without example... the philosophical men" while another participants wishes for more "experimental issues". Events are all about balance!

Thanks for taking the time to answer and produce the survey. Download the full report here.

I'm often asked: "Don't you think putting all the videos online is shooting yourself in the foot?". No no, the free videos are part of our public service mission, and they don't replace one of Lift's biggest added value: the quality networking. Nothing beats face to face, whatever technology you have. Attending Lift brings concrete returns as shown in the Lift08 post conference survey:

Did you get any new business at LIFT08?”

Of the 145 attendees that responded, some 20% confirmed that they did get new business at LIFT08 and 45% responded that had established interesting contacts at LIFT that could perhaps generate new business. The remaining 35% said that they did not get any new business at LIFT08 but with many commenting that this was not their aim in attending LIFT or was not part of their current professional role.

Link

We should get together even more in hard times. Network is the new job security after all!

Every year in April we know if we did a good job or not, if you guys liked the event or not. We anxiously await Glenn O'Neil's post-conference survey he has been doing for LIFT for the past three years (see LIFT06 and LIFT07 surveys).

As usual the community massively answered our call for feedback (thanks to the 272 attendees who took the time to answer), and as usual you were kind enough to give us a good grade, with 89% of attendees having a good or excellent overall appreciation (and nobody called LIFT08 very poor which I'm quite proud of). FULL REPORT HERE (pdf).

The report indicates we achieved some of our main goals (networking, learning and exchanging) with room for improvement on a few things like the venue. Some formats will be improved, like discussions (we really need a more quiet place, you will have that in Asia and next year) and Open Stage (I hope more LIFTers will get involved when voting time comes).

Read the full report here (and be sure to check page 5 to see the evolution over the three editions), and I will soon post my thoughts and the things that will change as a consequence of all the feedback. Thanks to all, and congrats to the team who deserves a big praise after such a plebiscite :)

Every year in April we know if we did a good job or not, if you guys liked the event or not. We anxiously await Glenn O'Neil's post-conference survey he has been doing for LIFT for the past three years (see LIFT06 and LIFT07 surveys).

As usual the community massively answered our call for feedback (thanks to the 272 attendees who took the time to answer), and as usual you were kind enough to give us a good grade, with 89% of attendees having a good or excellent overall appreciation (and nobody called LIFT08 very poor which I'm quite proud of). FULL REPORT HERE (pdf).

The report indicates we achieved some of our main goals (networking, learning and exchanging) with room for improvement on a few things like the venue. Some formats will be improved, like discussions (we really need a more quiet place, you will have that in Asia and next year) and Open Stage (I hope more LIFTers will get involved when voting time comes).

Read the full report here (and be sure to check page 5 to see the evolution over the three editions), and I will soon post my thoughts and the things that will change as a consequence of all the feedback. Thanks to all, and congrats to the team who deserves a big praise after such a plebiscite :)

At least that is what happened to the 28 participants that Glenn O'Neil surveyed at LIFT07. Fascinating research and surprising conclusions:

• These 28 participants had considerable networks prior to the conference - reaching some 30% of all participants.
• These networks increased after the conference - the 28 people were then connected to some 50% of all participants.
• Based on the sample of 28 participants, most participants doubled their networks at LIFT07 - e.g. if you went to the conference knowing five people, you would likely meet another five people at the conference - thus doubling your network to ten.

Here is the network map before the conference:

Then after:

Full report available on Glenn O'Neill's blog. We are looking for more great insights from Glenn and his new venture, Owl Re, our survey partner for LIFT08.