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

Sylvain Bauza sbauza at redhat.com
Thu May 19 13:40:31 UTC 2016



Le 19/05/2016 15:19, Tristan Goode a écrit :
> So let me get this straight... You're proposing that only speakers vote for
> talks yeah?
>
> Because hey, fuck the audience right?

I'd be totally opposed to that idea that would induce a clear bias.
Let me explain : while the Foundation is trusting a different set of 
people at every Summit for each track, the above would create a define 
list of people that would be quite the same for each Summit - because we 
know that people naturally tend to prefer their own close relations.

Don't blame me, but I'm seeing this as an argument about how much we 
currently trust the track chairs as non-biased people. FWIW, if we agree 
with the fact that track chairs are good for their duty, why should we 
change how we select them ?
Maybe the proposal is to leave the track chairs, and only allow votes 
from previous speakers ? If so, that's even more terrible : we're moving 
from a representative democracy (the track chairs) to an oligarchy.

As a regular contributor helping my peers to submit talks, I can just 
say : kill the votes, they're unnecessarly creating confusion about the 
selection process, leave how the Foundation pick the track chairs 
because it has been proven that the talks were high-quality, and just 
improve the feedback process so that track chairs can use that for their 
own judgment.

-Sylvain


>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Florian Haas [mailto:florian at hastexo.com]
>> Sent: Thursday, 19 May 2016 6:00 PM
>> To: Lana Brindley <openstack at lanabrindley.com>
>> Cc: community <community at lists.openstack.org>
>> Subject: Re: [openstack-community] Proposal: remove voting on speaking
>> proposals for Barcelona Summit
>>
>> Hi Lana!
>>
>> On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 3:23 AM, Lana Brindley
>> <openstack at lanabrindley.com> wrote:
>>> I'm actually really starting to like Florian's proposed method, with one
>> exception: I don't like the idea of limiting it to talk submitters. The
>> reason I
>> say this is that, before I was a PTL, I submitted talks to every summit.
>> That
>> stopped when I became a PTL because, quite simply, I spend most of my
>> time running sessions in the Design Summit, only popping over to the main
>> conference for the talks I absolutely don't want to miss. I think by
>> limiting the
>> voting to only people submitting talks, you will miss the voice of people
>> who
>> deliberately *don't* submit a talk, because they're massively invested in
>> other aspects of the conference, especially those on the more technical
>> side
>> of the house.
>>> Perhaps, instead of limiting it to talk submitters, maybe make it
>>> available to
>> a different subset: people who have attended previously, maybe?
>>
>> Hmmm. Well I'm afraid limiting talk votes to talk submitters is exactly
>> what
>> makes the proposed approach meaningful. :)
>>
>> If you have a minute, please consider reviewing Prof. Merrifield's remarks
>> in
>> the video when Brady asks his question starting with "call me a cynic",
>> about
>> https://youtu.be/7c0CoXFApnM?t=6m25s — this is exactly the part that
>> makes this system self-policing, and it goes out the window if your own
>> proposal isn't at stake.
>>
>> Side note, if your assessment badly disagrees with what everyone else has
>> been thinking about a proposal, then this is not necessarily because
>> you're
>> naughty and you want to game the system — you may just be a shoddy
>> reviewer who went over their reviewed proposals in a rush whereas
>> everyone else gave them more time. That, too, is something that the system
>> *should* penalize, because it ensures the quality of the review process.
>>
>> There is one other criticism to this, which is the opposite: what if I'm
>> being
>> *extremely* diligent and I detect an issue that no-one else detects? This
>> is
>> addressed here: https://youtu.be/bplncn4xC74?t=1m48s
>> (tl;dw: have public, anonymized free-form comments available to all
>> reviewers).
>>
>> At any rate though, I can't think of a way to do this that does *not* make
>> the
>> group of reviewers identical with the group of submitters.
>> And quite frankly, I quite like it as it is, considering the fact that the
>> proposed
>> system forces everyone not only to think "how would I rank this", but also
>> "how would *others* rank this", which is exactly what you want for the
>> benefit of the much greater group of conference attendees (as opposed to
>> speakers).
>>
>> What are your thoughts on that?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Florian
>>
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