On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 1:35 AM, Claire Massey <claire@openstack.org> wrote:
Thanks Nick and Florian. Yes, it has been a very dynamic conversation. :)
Our Summit team here at the Foundation thinks traditions are an important part of our community culture, but we hate to do things (like voting) just because that’s what we’ve always done. In making the proposal to end voting, I think we’ve challenged our thinking around it and come up with some really good ideas. I am now personally leaning toward keeping voting this round with some tweaks and better communication around the purpose, with the option to reevaluate after Barcelona.
If possible from a development standpoint, we would support the following ideas in this thread: - enabling comments to provide track chairs more feedback ahead of their decision and speakers more input as they prepare their talk - removing static/linkable URLs for promotion to reduce the noise and gaming - clarifying the purpose of voting as a piece of input for track chairs in the speaker selection process
Right. As an interim solution for Barcelona, all this sounds prudent. I would also add actively encouraging community reviewers to provide free-form comments on suggested talks, rather than "only" giving their vote.
We're on the fence about displaying each voter a limited, random subset of talks, because some folks only care about specific tracks or topics, and some folks have diligently rated every single talk in the past. We think it would be very difficult and counter to the purpose of community voting if we tried to limit the pool of voters to speakers or conference attendees (the latter simply because a very small percentage are actually registered at the point in time we start voting).
Fair enough, as far as I am concerned.
Additionally, we would support publishing the names of track chairs earlier in the process with clear guidance not to contact or badger them about your talk.
Yes, that would be very helpful. Cheers, Florian