The first Gerrit Virtual User Summit took place online on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2021.
If you have missed the Summit, all the presentations and content are online and is directly pointed by the details of the sessions from the main schedule.
All the recordings of the presentations and associated anonymized Q&A are accessible from GerritForge’s TV channel on YouTube.

The Virtual User Summit format and numbers

The Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 was held online to allow most of the community around the globe to attend and share their experience and ideas and avoid the problems with the traveling restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the limitations of the remote format, the interest and attendance to the Virtual User Summit has been outstanding, confirming the resiliency of the community and the will to inform and ask questions, share opinions and discuss no matter the difficulties and challenges.

See below some of the numbers of the Summit:

• 92 registered attendees, with 71 of them showing up at at least one of the two dates (77% of attendance)
• 17 countries connected (Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, UK, USA)
• 56 companies
• 14 sessions in 2 days
• 15 presenters

Despite the limitations of the remote interaction and the hours, this has been the largest User Summit ever, terrific news for the whole community.

What do people think about the Summit?

All the 71 attendees have received a Survey about the Summit, 24 of them have provided their feedback.

Q1: How would you rate the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 edition?
The average rating has been 7.9 over 10, with the 45% rating 9 to 10 points out of 10.

Q2: What was your main objective in attending the Summit?
Most responses were around “learning about Gerrit’s new features and initiatives” and “getting in touch with the community and its users”.

Q3: Do you consider to have achieved the objective?
88% of the people said “yes”, which seems consistent with the 7.9/10 overall rating of the Summit.

Q4: If your answer was “no”, what is the aspect that was not achieved?
All of them expressed concerns about the inability to have a two-way direct with the other users at the Summit, which is mainly linked to the technical difficulties and limitations of a remote webinar platform.

Q5: How satisfied are you with the quality of the presentations?
The average rating has been 8.2 over 10, with the 55% rating 9 to 10 points out of 10.

Q6: Would you prefer to have your camera on during the Summit as an attendee?
53% answered no, which shows that opinions are divided on the topic of having remote face-to-face communication with such a large audience.

Q7: Would you like to have breakout rooms to interact as part of the Summit?
76% answered yes, giving good confidence of trying that approach in the next Summit, assuming that would be “virtual” again.

Q8: What would be the best way for you to interact with other attendees and speakers during the Virtual Summit?
The majority of the answers were directed to the use of breakout rooms with a moderator, which matches the feedback given on Q7.

Q9: What platform would you suggest to deliver future Virtual Summits?
Most people did not express preferences, while others mentioned Zoom, Google Meet, and GoToWebinar (the one used during this 2021 Summit).

Q10: What did you like the most about the 2021 Summit, and what should be improved in the subsequent Summits?
Most of the people liked the content and quality of the presentations, which matches the high scores given in Q5. Also, the format of 3h per day, split into two different days, looks optimal for compatibility with the existing working day. Registration and attending the event were straightforward, and the browser-based integration with the stream of Q&A was easy.
The proposals for improvements were on the following points:

• Having more talks about user stories: do people use topics? What they use for CI integration for them? How people vote on changes/topics?
• Having direct interactions between participants, seeing their faces and talking to them directly
• More communication and advertisement of the event beforehand
• More seamless transition between the webinar part and the interactive Q&A session

What’s next for 2022?

With the new Omicron-variant of COVID-19 raging in the UK and the risk of global expansion in 2022, a face-to-face User Summit next year is still possible but unlikely.
The huge success of the Virtual Summit format could lead us to try an improved version in 2022, trying other platforms like Zoom or Google Meet.

Many new exciting features are coming in 2022, including the release of Gerrit v3.6 and the Prolog-less Submit Requirements. We would love to see again what the community thinks about it and interact more with the real-life Gerrit Code Review users and administrators.

Thanks again to those who have participated and presented at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021. See you next year for another exciting and more engaging get-together in 2022!