On 05/18/2016 12:24 AM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
On 05/17/2016 12:40 PM, Claire Massey wrote:
With the growing number of speaking submissions (we had 1,300 for Austin), some community members have expressed concerns about social media channels and email getting spammed during the week of voting. We also think many community members are unclear as to how much the votes weigh on the final decision. For example, some think that if someone campaigns for votes or asks their colleagues to vote, the session will likely be accepted (which may not be the case).
I have always considered the public voting a celebration of the success of the summit and nothing else. It's a ritual for the OpenStack community: twice a year we ask speakers to propose their talks and we celebrate all of the submissions. In this celebration, people from anywhere (the crowd) give their opinions...
The rituals and the celebrations contribute to define communities, online and not.
I've argued at length that the crowd's votes are a by-product of the celebration and are to be discarded by the track chairs.
And for what it's worth I have objected to this and will continue to do so. I believe we agree that track chairs should not consider the community vote to be binding. I believe we disagree, however, in that you're arguing the community vote should be discarded, while I very much believe track chairs should consider it.
The crowd has no wisdom in this context, it can and will be easily manipulated (think what happened when Pilates run a popularity contest asking the crowd to vote).
I agree with the second part of this sentence (unless we're discussing historical accuracy ;) ), but I very much disagree with the first.
Track chairs should be trusted instead, therefore they need to be picked carefully (like they've been).
[...]Our thinking is that by removing voting from the process, we will:
- Save valuable time during the overall Summit programming process, which should allow us to publish the final agenda and notify speakers sooner - Allow our development teams more time to focus on improving the mobile app and web schedule developed during the last Summit cycle
These considerations by Foundation staff are very practical and it's hard to counter these. Time is not compressible and it's quite clear that development efforts are already stretching the team thin.
My vote is to keep the celebrations pre-summit but not at the expense of dev team's sanity. The executives at the foundation are the best judges for this.
If I may ask one provocative question. Pretty much every Summit I get an email from a new person at the Foundation I haven't met before, and/or who didn't work for the Foundation the Summit before. So I am guessing that ramping up headcount isn't an issue for the Foundation, neither for funding nor for organizational considerations. [Please correct me if I'm wrong here.] If the dev team is overloaded to the point of insanity, is it really an issue to give them more help? Yes, I've read Brooks. I'm not arguing that hiring (or contracting out to) additional developers will have a short-term positive impact. But if this wasn't addressed after Tokyo to benefit Barcelona, then it should be addressed now, to benefit Boston and Sydney.
This can be easily fixed by recommending the track chairs to ignore the votes (even hide the results from track chair tool) and communicate clearly that the crowd is not 'voting' on anything, just participating in a ritual. It's a small fix to documentation and recommendations to chairs.
Which means that track chairs would have to completely guess what the audience might find interesting. In a community that is constantly growing, diversifying and spreading. Don't you think you're making the track chairs' work significantly more difficult that way, and more importantly, that this is detrimental to the quality of the tracks overall? Cheers, Florian