First off thank you for hosting it. Kudos to the organizers for their initiative.
I have completed the survey and here are a few learnings for me that I can offer up. Since they are my personal opinion their worth is strictly <$0.02 :)
I noticed -
1) The mix of attendees ranged from new members to experienced users. We need to find a balance such that everyone along that spectrum takes away the most that we can share.
2) The setting was informal/social. In the future, we may need to plan a balance between that and a more logistically constructive environment. This will tie into the organizer's "vision" of what is the intended goal from a meeting.
3) I think, we need white board(s) to do a bit of storyboarding and solution designing before going to the Alteryx canvas on some individual problems (not all). Pictures and concepts helped our team early on in visualizing solutions. Deconstructing a problem into a skeleton of smaller pieces on a whiteboard helps in developing solutions. This is an important trait that comes with practice to the experienced Alteryx user but not always naturally to the new user.
4) Maybe we consider WebEx or other screen sharing technology if projection to multiple screens is not possible. Even in one room, people could start up a laptop on each table to help follow the content.
Finally, as far as content is concerned two things to consider -
1) We could take some of the previous Grand Prix challenges, demo their solutions and then explore alternate themes along those lines.
2) If that's not feasible then we could build themes for each meeting and follow that. For example, if the theme was predictive modeling, we could say their are a few key steps in predictive modeling - Data blending, Data cleansing, feature creation, exploring models, scoring and testing and finally deploying. There are some amazing datasets available freely (example, kaggle.com or the UCI repository) where you can demo some of the parts of each of these steps.
Thanks,
Som
