[openstack-community] Proposal: remove voting on speaking proposals for Barcelona Summit

atul jha koolhead17 at gmail.com
Wed May 18 13:14:05 UTC 2016


Hi,

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 6:26 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Personally, I have always found voting to be exclusionary in its nature
> - it is a popularity contest where those with the broadest reach get
> more and better votes - and tacky ("vote for my talk!", or worse, "vote
> for my employer's talk proposals!" tweets are uncouth at best, actively
> damaging to community identity at worst).
>
> Certainly, voting can help eliminate some options - out of laziness, we
> have considered only the top 30 talks out of 60 proposals for 8 talk
> slots in a past conference, and 5 of the talks were voted in the top 8.
> But in general, I do not see a lot of alignment between what makes the
> best content and what gets the most/best votes. Also, as a presenter, I
> have never felt comfortable in the "pimp my talk" zone - and I'm pretty
> extroverted. I can only imagine that having to "sell" your proposal to
> the community is even more uncomfortable for others - especially those
> new to our community - so, as I say above, I see the practice as
> exclusionary and intimidating.
>
> I'm all in favour of dropping it, as I have said for the past 3 summits.
>

+1 to Dave

>
> Thanks,
> Dave.
>
> On 05/17/2016 06:24 PM, 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. 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). 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.
> >
> >> - Reduce the spam and noise around voting, so we don't cause Twitter
> >> fatigue before we're promoting the final agenda and key themes
> >
> > Twitter *is* fatigue by another name, honestly... this is a thin
> > objection, can be fixed with little investment from the Foundation staff.
> >
> >> - Level the playing field for speakers from startups, new community
> >> members, etc. who may not have an established network in the community
> >> for voting
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > /stef
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Community mailing list
> > Community at lists.openstack.org
> > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
> >
>
> --
> 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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> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community
>


Best,
-- 
Atul Jha

www.atuljha.com
@ koolhead17 <https://twitter.com/koolhead17>
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