Open Stack

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:56 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 don't disagree, but I do maintain that if we move this to a peer
ranking scheme, where only those how submit talks get to review other
submissions, the exclusion/intimidation aspect would likely vanish. If
people are no longer offered the whole slew of talks, but only a small
random subset thereof, we get better review coverage and the task is a
lot less daunting than it is now.

In fact, with a randomized subset peer-review scheme like that, we
could even drop track chairs, which would completely remove any
popularity contest effect from track chair selection as well, and
would completely nix the risk of track chair lobbying.

You submit a talk, you have a say in the overall program. Simple as
that. Kind of like you submit patches, you have a say in the direction
your project is taking.

Cheers,
Florian