Open Stack

Personally, I found the wide range of talks very interesting and there are several that I would be following up on even if they are not selected for the summit. Thus, a full list of talk proposals is valuable.

However, the track chairs should be able to balance the vote with their knowledge of the community. The vote should only be advisory rather than mechanical. Selecting the top votes risks being dominated by the current topic du jour rather than a balance of interest of the community. I would not be in favour of limiting the vote to those attending since the videos of the talks are much more widely viewed (and helps for multiple parallel bookings for summit attendees)

Overall, I think the importance is that the track chairs feel empowered to choose the appropriate balance of talks for the tracks. There is always a risk of selection bias from the track chairs so there should also be a reasonable turnover in those roles too and a feedback loop for attendees to rate the tracks for interest.

How do other big conferences organise this ? We can't be the only ones with over subscribed summits.

Tim

From: Tristan Goode [mailto:tristan at aptira.com]
Sent: 20 February 2014 22:06
To: Adam Nelson; Dave Neary
Cc: community at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-community] OpenStack Summit proposal voting - not a fan

I tend to agree. Perhaps voting could be limited to those that have RSVPed and are actually going to the Summit as well?

In an effort to do my best and look at all the submissions, I voted for a combined several hours in a few goes yesterday and still haven't reached any kind of end. It did seem like presentations came past multiple times and the volume of talks with a tenuous link to OpenStack made it a challenge.

There were also talks in there that were submitted for HKG that had NOT been submitted to ATL. I confirmed this with a couple of submitters.

It also seemed like some folks submit several talks that are almost the same, and some people just submit too many talks. Perhaps a one or two talk per person limit. Or one talk and one panel.

This time I do hope we don't see the combination of talks like we had in HKG which I thought was a good idea as a track chair beforehand, but when I went and saw them on some occasions I felt for the speakers.

Am going to have another crack at finishing my voting today. Wish me luck :-P


From: Adam Nelson [mailto:adam at varud.com<mailto:adam at varud.com>]
Sent: Friday, 21 February 2014 4:04 AM
To: Dave Neary
Cc: community at lists.openstack.org<mailto:community at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [openstack-community] OpenStack Summit proposal voting - not a fan

Lots of conferences do this to boost interest and engage with the community.... but you're absolutely right.

A good compromise would be to give track leaders some magic votes to boost certain talks and veto others.

One way to implement this would be to allow tracks to have their own algorithms.  Openstack is too broad to have one method for all the talks and I think it's totally reasonable to have a default method which track chairs can override.

-Adam

--
Kili - Cloud for Africa: kili.io<http://kili.io/>
Musings: twitter.com/varud<https://twitter.com/varud>
More Musings: varud.com<http://varud.com>
About Adam: www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson<https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson>

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 6:51 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at redhat.com<mailto:dneary at redhat.com>> wrote:
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

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