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[Events] Micro remarks about the UMD open source comes to campus exit survey

Asheesh Laroia asheesh at asheesh.org
Mon Apr 16 23:38:28 UTC 2012


I finally just sent it out to all the attendees, based on the sign-ups we 
got via a Google Doc form that was used for RSVPs. I know this is 
imperfect, as we surely had some no-shows and others who didn't RSVP via 
that form.

The form was pre-filled with people's email addresses; I sent individual 
(form) emails to everyone on that spreadsheet.

I accidentally auto-filled the "Name" field with people's email addresses, 
due to confusion about which field ID was correct to autofill and have it 
show up in the rendered form as an auto-filled email address. When I 
discovered this, I after-the-fact modified the Google Docs form and 
switched the field IDs around to work around this mistake. In the future 
I'll click on the sample links that I send myself as part of the mass 
email process.

In case anyone's curious what software I used, I'm using a custom fork of 
https://github.com/qoda/python-mailer . It's somewhat rough around the 
edges, and I will clean up my commits and push my fork shortly.

For completeness, I'm enclosing the email template text I used here, in 
case it's useful to me or others down the road. Also, I only used people's 
first names, in part because it avoids escaping problems with the URL, and 
in part because it seems like it'd seeem friendlier to read an email to 
your first name.

Oh, and also, two months post-event is a long time to wait for an exit 
survey. Now that I have all the pieces in place, we should be able to get 
them going way faster in the future.

P.S. If you all want to not hear "how the sausage gets made" quite as 
much, I can talk a little less here. (-:

-- Asheesh.

Hi <!--name-->,

I'm glad you signed up for and attended the UMD Open Source
Comes to Campus workshop! I wanted to ask just a few questions
about how the event went and how we can support you.

I created a web form with those questions. The survey is pretty short,
and should take only about five minutes to answer.

Here's your special link to get started:

http://smarturl.it/umd-survey?entry_17=<!--email-->

I'd love if you could fill it out. Again, it should be pretty quick,
taking about five minutes, and it will help us help you with your
next steps on open source contribution. Additionally, it helps us
improve these events for future groups!

Thanks,

-- Asheesh.



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