On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 8:15 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh(a)redhat.com> wrote:
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On 11/16/2015 04:49 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 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(a)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.
>
Well, this can be a double-edged sword. I know from conversations with
Red Hatters and non-Red Hatters alike that it's far easier to get
financial assistance (either from the conference budget or their
$DAYJOB) to attend Flock if they are going to be speaking rather than
if they are going to be simply attendees. (Many of the non-speaker
attendees I have talked to have been spending vacation time on coming
to the conference, which is inspiring but should really not be
required of people if we can help avoid it).
It's not double edged. It's exactly how we say the conference funding
works. We fund people coming to provide the content of the
conference. Speakers first, then if there are funds left over, we
fund non-speakers. Which, aside from the lower number of non-speaker
registrations anyway, is why the majority of the conference is
attended by speakers.
Also, funding speakers is normal in terms of conference registration
fees but we a) don't have those and b) fund their travel and lodging
too. To my knowledge, Flock is the only conference that covers all
these costs for participants. For other conferences, people are also
either taking vacation time to attend and paying out of pocket, or
they are getting their employers to do so. We are already doing as
much as we can so that the majority of Flock attendees don't have to
do that. I'm not sure we can fund _more_ people without a vastly
larger budget, or reducing the conference venue to something that is
ill equipped to foster productivity.
Now, if we cut it down to a single day of talks then that limits the
number of "speakers" and opens up things a bit. We'd still have
people running workshops, but now maybe we can look at funding
critical attendees for those to get stuff done. The number of
workshop submissions is far fewer than talks, and I suspect it would
remain so.
josh