On Aug 31, 2015 7:42 PM, "Dave Neary" <dneary@redhat.com> wrote:

Thanks Lauren,

On 08/31/2015 07:57 PM, Lauren Sell wrote:

 From my perspective, the opportunity to vote on Summit sessions
provides a strong community feedback mechanism so it’s not just a small
group of people making decisions. It also provides a level of
transparency because all submitted sessions are published and available
to review, analyze, etc. (such as the keyword analysis several community
members perform each Summit, or how other community organizers mine the
information to recruit speakers for their own regional events). The
results give track chairs a starting point (or sometimes a tie breaker
when needed) and it helps them rule out sessions that have been
consistently poorly reviewed.

Back in February, during the voting process last time, I sent some feedback on the voting process to the community list - the main reasons I don't like the process are:
* 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

One more to add: this process encourages the kind of corporate divisiveness we should be trying to remove from OpenStack - every time, there's the "vote for the following proposals from your colleagues" emails, the blog post encouraging people to "vote for these 13 great proposals" which just happen to be the 13 from that company, etc. It's the worst of corporate jingoism, and (as I said) it doesn't make us look good.

I'd much prefer that we just trust the track chairs to make good choices (which is, after all, what we do now).

<snip>

Finally, you can read more about the track chair and voting process at
this link:
https://www.openstack.org/summit/tokyo-2015/selection-process/ (that’s
the unique URL, but it was also published on the Summit speaking
submission page and the Summit FAQ). To Steve’s point, it sounds like we
need to do a better job making that information more visible. To start,
we are planning to link to it from the schedule page as “How were these
sessions selected?”

I was not aware of the link above, and the Etherpad linked from there is great, but it's a little ephemeral - it would be great to have track chairs be more visible during the call for papers process.

Thanks again,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary - NFV/SDN Community Strategy
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +1-978-399-2182 / Cell: +1-978-799-3338

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