Open Stack

There are three choices. Democracy or not, or the barrel.





*From:* Roland Chan [mailto:roland at aptira.com]
*Sent:* Friday, 20 May 2016 12:06 AM
*To:* Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com>
*Cc:* community <community at lists.openstack.org>
*Subject:* Re: [openstack-community] Proposal: remove voting on speaking
proposals for Barcelona Summit



This attendees-only idea isn't entirely without merit, but the audience
isn't just people who attend. That is, unless the travel support program
decides to go webscale. One can't exclude voters because they can't afford
to spend a few thousand dollars to fly to Austin for a week. Some may say
such a proposition would be be racist in effect if not intent, but I
couldn't possibly comment. :P

There are two fundamental choices: democracy or not (which includes
curation, oligarchy and dictatorship).

If we want to have a reduced franchise we may as well exclude everyone that
is affiliated to a submitter (perhaps outside of the marketing talks, and
who goes to them?). That would certainly solve the inherent bias issues
whilst also minimising dross.

Roland

On 19 May 2016 11:32 pm, "Doug Hellmann" <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:

Excerpts from Florian Haas's message of 2016-05-19 10:00:25 +0200:
> 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
>

I feel like this system assumes bad faith on the part of the
contributor (speaker, reviewer, and voter), and tries to enforce
good behavior through rules and technology. I would rather we have
a more public way of selecting track chairs and then have faith in
them to evaluate talks objectively for relevance and quality, sharing
guidance and feedback as part of the process.

Doug

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