[Chicago] selecting talks Re: [PyCON-Organizers] Talk slot durations (was: FWD: Re: Pycon disappointment)

[Atul Varma]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:51 AM, John Melesky <list at phaedrusdeinus.org>
wrote:

> > Then each community member is given a pool of, say, 50 points, that
> > they can distribute between proposals however they like (or a
> > different voting system could be used, I dunno).
>
> Except for this part. Instead of 50 points, every registered user
> could vote a talk up or down if they wished (in a reddit/digg-like
> fashion). No real need to limit people.
>

My (admittedly off-the-cuff) impetus for limiting people was to provide some
mechanism for actually choosing between lots of really good proposals; for
instance, if every single PyCon talk happened to get a "thumbs up" from
every single community member, this wouldn't actually help in determining
what talks to accept--this isn't really a problem with BARcamp AFAIK because
there's always room for more talks, but it is a problem with PyCon.  By
giving people a limited number of points, they're forced to choose which
talks they want to vote for, which will help determine which of the really
interesting talks ultimately get picked (if this is even an issue, which I'm
not sure is the case).

In other words, I'm not saying that I think we should definitely give people
a limited number of points, I'm just saying that there can be good reasons
to do so, depending on the context. :)

Possible downsides:
> - Puts perhaps even more weight on the talk summary/abstract than the
> committee method does


Personally I think that this can be a good thing; if the speaker isn't
willing to put much effort into a talk summary/abstract, then how much
effort are they likely to put into their actual presentation?  And with the
more social aspects of comment threads, even if their talk didn't get
accepted, they will hopefully at least get some good feedback that will help
them create a better proposal next year, or they can take what they've
worked on so far and present it at a different venue, e.g. ChiPy or BARcamp,
or perhaps make a screencast out of it, etc.

- Should we let the masses choose their own talks?
>

If the masses are intelligent, then I'm all for this, and I think that the
Python community is pretty intelligent. The only real potential downside I
see here is if only a certain segment of the Python community ends up
voting--for instance, if only veteran Pythonistas vote, then the conference
will be largely skewed towards them.  This probably isn't such a big deal
when the voting process occurs relatively close to the actual event, which
is the case with BARcamp, but with an event like PyCon where the voting
would take place 3-5 months before the event, I'm guessing that the voter
turnout could be significantly different from the attendee turnout.

- Atul
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