On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 03:39:50PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Stephen Gallagher sgallagh@redhat.com wrote:
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I just wanted to reopen this topic from ages past.
Since Flock began, talks have been voted on anonymously, with only the conference organizers knowing who has proposed this talk. The intention of course was to ensure that we don't end up only with talks from long-time contributors getting voted in. Unfortunately, this has occasionally resulted in situations where someone who does not have sufficient expertise talking about things (and those who do have had their talk excluded because they didn't write as interesting a synopsis).
The latter case is intended and actually showing the process working. Why would you vote for someone that has a boring sounding talk and cannot take the time and effort to write a decent synopsis? Similarly, the conference is created around what the attendees find interesting. Even if the synopsis is very accurate and detailed, if it isn't interesting to the majority then it isn't going to get votes. And while this has happened, it has been very very limited. We simply do not get enough talk submissions to cut as many as people would think.
As for "sufficient expertise", yes we had that issue. We've learned from it and take expertise into account when creating the schedule. Remember, the votes are a heavy part of the creation but they are not the final say at all. I do not believe the last Flock had this issue. If you know of cases where someone without sufficient expertise presented a talk, please email the flock staff privately.
Highlighting this: votes are an input but not the final say on schedule. I think that's a good way to ensure some sanity in the content from perspectives like importance to the project, coherence with the list of travel subsidies, and so on. Voting does not automatically yield great content.
So this year, I'd like to suggest that we consider including the speaker's identity in the voting. If we're still concerned about it becoming a "good-old-boys' club", then perhaps we could provide a specific track or other reserved space specifically for relative newcomers (scheduled carefully so that these are not ignored).
I'm opposed to setting aside space for newcomers. I'm skeptical about allowing speaker identity in the votes, but not strictly opposed. Frankly, I'd like to see a major reduction in _talks_ overall. Perhaps one day of them, with the remainder of Flock being focused on _doing_ things. If that happens, then competition for talk slots is going to be higher.
Some of these talks are easy to figure out authorship anyway. But I also agree -- putting a little more emphasis on hacking, and maybe building content around it, could yield better results. Not that Flock has been bad, just that the amount of talk content seems really high to me for the size of the conference itself... like 1/3 or so of people are speakers? I'm just guessing at numbers though.