I'm in favour too. It has potential, let's see how an anonymous community process works in practice.
P. On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Volker Mische <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > On 10/01/2012 06:10 PM, Barry Rowlingson wrote: >> In our bid for FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham, we didn't precisely say how we >> intended to select presentations for the main track of the conference. >> Some discussion amongst the committee has been going on, and we think >> it necessary to informally poll the community to get a feel for what >> method is preferred. >> >> Previous FOSS4Gs have not used anonymous reviews (note: the Academic >> Track will be a double-blind review process, we are discussing the >> main conference presentations here), and have used a blend of >> committee reviews and community reviews. Note that even with a >> numerical ranking system its normally still necessary to do a manual >> step to get a balanced conference. >> >> The big change we could do would be to have anonymous community >> reviews. Proposals would be rated based on title and abstract only. >> The arguments for this include: >> >> * selection is on quality of proposal rather than bigness of name >> * rating procedure can prevent up-votes from whoever has the most >> followers on twitter >> * promotes inclusivity: >> http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got-25-percent-women-speakers.html >> >> and against arguments include: >> >> * some names are big draws, and it would be disappointing to not have >> someone because their abstract wasn't that exciting. >> * previous FOSS4Gs have used non-anonymous reviewing and that worked >> fine. Why change it? >> * it may be hard to distil an exciting talk into an abstract without >> losing the excitement. >> >> So, as this would be quite a change for FOSS4G, what do you - the >> OSGeo community at large - think? I do have a google poll nearly ready >> on this, but lets have a bit of a debate here and maybe it won't even >> be necessary. > > I think an anonymous selection process makes a lot of sense. I > personally always hoped that people don't do a "please up-vote me" > campaigns on blogs or Twitter, but it happened. It will still be > possible as people could publish the titles of the abstract, but I hope > this won't happen and everyone will play along nicely. > > One thing we have to keep in mind, that this conference is different > from the JSConf.eu. The JSConf.eu is about the bleeding edge an what's > hot in the fast changing JavaScript world. The audience are definitely > non-beginners. At the FOSS4G the audience is way more wide-spread. It > ranges from beginners to absolute pros. Hence there are also talks that > are kind of the same every year. Things that come to my mind are my own > talks, which are always about GeoCouch, or the "State of ..." talks. > They have a place, but you'd know upfront the the "State of GeoServer" > e.g. is done by one of the big names of GeoServer and respectively a > talk mentioning GeoCouch is probably me. What I want to say is, you > can't fully prevent that people up-vote well known names. > > Of course there still needs to be the review process by the programm > committee that makes the final call, so that we e.g. don't have 5 talks > from the same person. > > To conclude: I'm in favour of trying it and seeing how it works. > > Cheers, > Volker > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
