And the winner is...

The results of the evaluations for the EclipseCon 2011 talks and tutorials is out. I thought it would be interesting to know which talks and tutorials were rated best. So I took the data from the PDF and did a little calculation.

Disclaimer / Government Health Warning: Any of these calculations may or may not be statistically significant.  They may include huge biases such as time of day, my personal decisions on how to do it and there might be errors in the data. So be forewarned, this is not an official ranking.

What I did was to count the +1’s, ignore the 0’s and substract the -1’s. The result was divided by the total number of votes resulting in an average value between -1 and 1. A very important decision is the cut point for being excluded from the sample, as there were a lot of sessions with very few votes. Some of them have an average of 1, but with very few votes this is quite arbitrary. So I decided to ignore sessions with less then 25 votes. That does not mean they were not great, I just don’t think it makes sense to include them from a statistical point of view. Further, if the average only differed 1%, I rated sessions equally to the next higher one.

To make a long story short, here are the results:

Keynotes

1. What is Watson? - 0.96
2. On Apache Hadoop - 0.92
3. Java Renaissance - 0.57

Top Five Talks

1. Case Study: NASA Ames uses Eclipse RCP for situational awareness of remote… - 0.98
2. Modularity Wars Episode IV: A New Hope - 0.95
3. Catch that bug before it happens! Improve code quality with static analysis - 0.94
4. Put it in reverse: using eclipse to understand code that has already been… - 0.92 Android development with Eclipse Building web apps with EMF and GWT A busy year for the Eclipse platform
5. Cross-platform mobile development with eclipse - 0.91 Dawn-Rise of the collaborative user interface

After the first 5 places there is a huge group of almost equally great talks between 0.9 and 0.8. So this is really only the tip of the iceberg.

Top Five Tutorials

1. Hands on with C/C++ IDE - 0.95
2. Developing Rich Clients with Eclipse 4.x RCP - 0.88
3. Architecture patterns and code templates for enterprise RCP apps - 0.87
4. Functional test automation for eclipse apps with Jubula - -0.85 Style It! The eclipse 4 styling tutorial Pragmatic DSL Design with Xtext, Xbase and Xtend 2
5. What every Eclipse Developer should know about EMF - 0.74

I would also like to mention the following sessions, which had very close to 25 attendees and had a very high ranking:

• Building a great community for your open source project (23 attendees) - 1.00
• The business of selling free software (21 attendees) - 1.00
• Developing Machine Control Systems with eTrice - live demo (24 attendees) - 0.91

Congratulations to the speakers who gave these great talks.  I hope no one feels offended at not being listed and I’d be glad to hear from you if you think there is something wrong or unfair with regards to the method.  And, don’t forget to hold to the disclaimer :-)

Here is the raw data:

EclipseCon evaluation