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Hi all,

Rather than just complain into the ether, I wanted to let people know
why I don't like the voting process for conference proposals and see if
I'm the only one.

I don't think that the voting process is the best way to gauge whether
proposals will be good for the conference. There are a few reasons for that:

* Having to hawk & promote proposal(s) is kind of unseemly, and makes us
look small, I think. Hundreds of people going "vote for me!" doesn't
make us look good.
* Some people don't want to pitch themselves, others don't have access
to as big a platform to promote
* The same issues exist with this system which exist with board voting -
there is a possibility that people will vote for their colleagues, not
out of any corruption, but just because no-one has time to rate all the
proposals, and they're more likely to rate those submitted by people
they know more highly
* Also, it's a self-selecting group of people who rate proposals - I
don't think voters will be representative of summit attendees
* After all is said and done, the proposals which are chosen by the
voters are guidelines to the people who choose the talks for the tracks,
the track leaders

I have been a track leader for the last number of summits, and I've seen
first hand great presentations get very low numbers of votes, while
others which are not as interesting get very high numbers of votes and
high ratings.

Personally, I would be happy if we could change the system to remove the
"pimp my talk" aspect for Summits.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13