Open Stack

On Sun, 2015-08-30 at 14:46 -0600, Matt Fischer wrote:
> 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.

FWIW, I think that approach is a great way to do it and I'm grateful to
the track chairs for the large and complex task they're undertaking.