Thank you for organising these events.
I was recently thinking that something is flawed with the way a standard jam is organised, especially for the more popular ones. When I participated in a smaller jam it was possible to play most games in a thorough way (more than one play session from start to end) and give constructive feedback. For the more popular jams with hundreds of participants what ends up happening in my experience is some of the submissions become popular while the rest are left out. And in the end the top N grab all the attention.
Maybe it's better to split jams into smaller cohorts of 20ish projects? Small communities would form naturally.
As a developer, after I submit the game, no matter how good the feedback is, the possibility for repair and growth is frozen in time - I cannot update it during the voting period, after that period people lose most of the motivation to experience the other projects or to experience the same project again. This nudges people to create tiny experiences which are abandoned after the event.
Would it not be better to divide a jam in two phases - main phase, preliminary feedback phase and then final submission? That way any technical issues or critical design mistakes can be fixed. UPDATE I missed one key point - split the participants into groups with a maximum of 20 submissions in a group. Preliminary feedback within the group. Then create new groups so that only some of the participants are in the same group two times. Submission and final feedback. This would boost the engagement and improve the final products. <== how does that sound? It is not necessary to make the event longer - just segment it.