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

Florian Haas florian at hastexo.com
Wed May 18 18:17:26 UTC 2016


On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 7:52 PM, Devananda van der Veen
<devananda.vdv at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

OK, that's a very fair point. Thanks. It's a very different angle
compared with "the crowd doesn't *know*" (emphasis mine), though.

Cheers,
Florian



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