Open Stack

+1


On August 30, 2015 4:17:05 PM Xav Paice <xavpaice at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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