Open Stack

On 05/18/2016 08:28 AM, Florian Haas wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at 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.

--devananda