Hi, I attended several conferences recently, and looking at them through a DebConf lens, I saw a (pretty common overall) idea which I think could benefit DebConf. The IRC people I bounced it off of somewhat liked it, so I'm sending it here.
These conferences had various "sessions" of 3-4 talks. Each session had a "session chair" which was in charge of introducing the speaker, providing an intro and some helping to bind them together, and in some cases finding the speakers for that session. So my rough idea was: - regular talk submission process goes on - anyone can submit talks right to us still. - Add to that a way to group things together. Seek out members of teams that have lots of talks, and invite one of them to be the "session chair" for this topic. The session chair can do this (doesn't have to be all): - Automatically approve talks on their selected topic (and of course, ask/pressure people to give talks if they think it would be helpful). - Look at the list of submitted talks and see if any would be good to have in their session. If the speaker wants to join up, they could adopt the talk. - Be given blocks of time in which to have all of their talks grouped. They can choose an order within this block for their talks, or choose to have multiple blocks, whatever is best. - Serve as the moderator for their session: provide an intro, introduce speakers, provide transitions, ... Or get someone else to, or do none of this if they want... - Serve as a go-between for the talk organization/scheduling committee and their speakers for simple things. - Make sure that their team has a really good program at DebConf. This implies that "session" is sort of a concept here, with one (or multiple) blocks of time. This has some advantages (having Python talks scheduled as a group makes it easier for them to not overlap, people can more easily go to all of the talks, stay together, ...) but this togetherness could also be seen as a disadvantage. Blocks could be distributed early/late in the week as desired by the session chair. And, of course, if a session chair chose to not schedule in blocks, that's fine too. If teams don't like this idea, then no one steps up to be a session chair and it doesn't affect them. If speakers don't want to be in a session, they just don't. So I don't think there's much disadvantage to giving people a change to order things some (and slightly reduce the number of people the main talk organizers have to work with). Thoughts? It's really up to the talk organizers... - Richard -- | Richard Darst - rkd@ - boltzmann: up 181 days, 19:33 | http://rkd.zgib.net - pgp 0xBD356740 | "Ye shall know the truth and -- the truth shall make you free" _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
