Open Stack

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 1:35 AM, Claire Massey <claire at openstack.org> wrote:
> Thanks Nick and Florian. Yes, it has been a very dynamic conversation. :)
>
> Our Summit team here at the Foundation thinks traditions are an important
> part of our community culture, but we hate to do things (like voting) just
> because that’s what we’ve always done. In making the proposal to end voting,
> I think we’ve challenged our thinking around it and come up with some really
> good ideas. I am now personally leaning toward keeping voting this round
> with some tweaks and better communication around the purpose, with the
> option to reevaluate after Barcelona.
>
> If possible from a development standpoint, we would support the following
> ideas in this thread:
> - enabling comments to provide track chairs more feedback ahead of their
> decision and speakers more input as they prepare their talk
> - removing static/linkable URLs for promotion to reduce the noise and gaming
> - clarifying the purpose of voting as a piece of input for track chairs in
> the speaker selection process

Right. As an interim solution for Barcelona, all this sounds prudent.
I would also add actively encouraging community reviewers to provide
free-form comments on suggested talks, rather than "only" giving their
vote.

> We're on the fence about displaying each voter a limited, random subset of
> talks, because some folks only care about specific tracks or topics, and
> some folks have diligently rated every single talk in the past. We think it
> would be very difficult and counter to the purpose of community voting if we
> tried to limit the pool of voters to speakers or conference attendees (the
> latter simply because a very small percentage are actually registered at the
> point in time we start voting).

Fair enough, as far as I am concerned.

> Additionally, we would support publishing the names of track chairs earlier
> in the process with clear guidance not to contact or badger them about your
> talk.

Yes, that would be very helpful.

Cheers,
Florian