Open Stack

I was a first year track chair this year and I think that "your vote
doesn't count" is not an accurate description from what I did. I can only
speak for my thoughts and our track, but votes certainly were part of the
process. Some talks had no votes or primarily negative votes, they were not
considered much. But then you end up with lots of talks, well more than the
11 we could pick, with a good number of positive votes. We get to see
counts and averages, is a talk with 65 votes and average of 2.5 better than
a talk with 72 votes and an average of 2.4? You're splitting hairs there,
so we can only use them as a rough guide for interest in the topic and
speaker. Also, if we had simply picked the top 11 (by averages), you'd have
ended up with an unbalanced track too many talks on the same topics for
example or by the same people.

Our goals were many, but included considering:

   - how were the votes? high votes? high score? etc
   - does the talk fit into this track? is it too advanced/too broad/too
   narrow?
   - is it probably a sales pitch?
   - are we covering the right things here? Does it fit into the goals of
   this track.
   - is the topic interesting to attendees? We try to think about what the
   audience is for the track and go from there.
   - is this a repeat from a previous year? Some talks are submitted with
   very similar sounding titles (although sometimes updates on xxx talks are
   good)
   - does anyone know the speaker? are they active in the community? an
   engaging speaker? a new fresh face that would bring a different perspective?
   - is this a duplicate talk? For example, out of the 11 talks we can
   pick, we don't have space for 4 talks on Chef, so lets pick one thats good
   and broad enough and fits this track.
   - do any of these talks include any locals who would not normally get a
   chance to talk or travel if this was in NA or Europe?

These are how I considered/weighed the talks and the bottom line is that I
assure there is no secret cabal ignoring everyone's wishes and jamming the
schedule onto you. (If there is, I don't yet have my robes and secret book,
please send). In fact I know of at least one talk that included many
"luminaries" that we did not pick that I'm sure upset people. I had a talk
in another track that I thought was a shoe-in that wasn't picked and I
think many of us are in that boat. This process took about 6-8 hours of my
time and we had a smaller track with about 90 talks to look through, many
of the other chairs had way more work.

So I hope that sheds some light on how the process worked at least for my
track.



On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 2:22 PM, Steve Gordon <sgordon at redhat.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Richard Raseley" <richard at raseley.com>
> > To: community at lists.openstack.org
> >
> > On 08/28/2015 10:24 AM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> > > If we had the data we may be able prove this assumption by checking for
> > > example if the higher amount of votes went to the proposals pushed by
> > > corporations with an organized marketing machine.
> >
> > That would be an interesting use for the data.
> >
> > > That's what I've always done too. I ignore votes as a track chair.
> > >
> > > I think the voting process is a celebration of our community, a party,
> a
> > > ritual to get into the 'summit season; it's not a useful tool to
> evaluate
> > > proposals.
> >
> > I understand that the track chairs have wide discretion in the selection
> > of sessions, which seems appropriate. That being said, I am a little
> > surprised at the casual nature with which current and former track
> > chairs have talked about how they outright 'ignore votes'.
> >
> > As a foundation member (I assume voting is restricted to foundation
> > members), I was under the impression that my vote would always count at
> > least a little bit (e.g. as a small part of some weighted score). If
> > that is not the case I think it would be appropriate to set those
> > expectations, as I am guessing that may others might be under the same
> > misapprehension.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Richard
>
> +1, while I've known this for a number of cycles I regularly encounter
> members of the Foundation who don't. It's not like this is ever broadcast
> anywhere except casually in email threads such as this one (usually with
> the implication that the person asking the question should somehow have
> known/expected their vote wouldn't count), have I missed it and there is in
> fact a public page documenting the talk selection process?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve
>
> _______________________________________________
> Community mailing list
> Community at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/community/attachments/20150830/7f4da8d1/attachment.html>