Excerpts from Nick Chase's message of 2016-05-18 11:57:54 -0400:
On 5/18/2016 9:09 AM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
Instead of votes, we may ask for written comments instead: I'd read those if I were a track chair and undecided about a proposal.
I'm not attached to votes per se: what I think we should keep is
- the drums beating signaling the incoming summit: these bring visibility - the openness: the fact that I can browse proposed talks is a valuable thing as a speaker and one that sets apart OpenStack from other conferences
I agree with Stef on all of this. I think we should have the ability for people to leave comments on a proposal, which then also necessitates having all of the talks visible at some point. Yes, there will likely be some spam management to be handled, but I think it's a small price to pay.
Given the amount of spam we deal with in our other tools, I think you're underestimating the cost. See the -dev and -infra mailing lists for the discussions of locking down (or shutting down) the wiki, for example. A web form with a text box is only slightly more complicated to game than a voting link. The alternate voting system proposed is interesting, but looks a bit complex to implement (especially given the rules for introducing negative feedback based on apparent attempts to game the vote). It may take us a while to build a system to support it, so I think we want a solution we can put in place more quickly, even if we do decide to try it out. Other conferences I'm involved with have a small program committee for each track. We did that for the Upstream Development track this last time around (maybe other tracks also have multiple chairs, I don't know). Having a group of informed people selecting talks based on the quality of the proposal and the subject matter included produced a track with good feedback from attendees. It seems like that should be able to work for other tracks, too, as long as we have a good balance in the chairs. Doug
We may even find that comments are helpful in shaping the talks and improving them prior to the summit.
---- Nick