On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 7:52 PM, Devananda van der Veen <devananda.vdv@gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/18/2016 08:28 AM, Florian Haas wrote:
On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano@openstack.org> wrote:
On 05/18/2016 03:14 AM, Florian Haas wrote:
Which means that track chairs would have to completely guess what the audience might find interesting.
The crowd doesn't know this either.
Are you saying the audience doesn't know what the audience finds interesting?
Just asking for clarification here.
As a previous track chair, I find the vote tallies "interesting" - they are more data to inform my decisions. Sometimes they match my assessment of the talk and speaker. However, it often tells me more about the popularity of the speaker (or size of their company) than whether anyone would find the talk interesting at the summit.
I am aware that some employers only send technical contributors to the conference if they are speaking; because of this, for some people, voting becomes a means to enable your friends/coworkers to attend the summit. While that is a choice employers are entitled to make for their travel budgets regardless of my opinions of that practice, popularity is clearly not the metric we should be using to gauge talk quality.
So, I agree with Stef: the vote results do not actually indicate what the audience finds interesting, because enough people are not voting based on what they would find interesting.
OK, that's a very fair point. Thanks. It's a very different angle compared with "the crowd doesn't *know*" (emphasis mine), though. Cheers, Florian