On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Bruce Bannerman <[email protected]> wrote: > Agreed. > > Well said Cameron, with the aside that there may be an interesting talk from > a previously little known person. > > I suggest leaving this to the discretion of the LOC and interested parties > who subscribe to that year’s FOSS4G mailing list. > > A popularity campaign is not required or wanted.
With my statistician hat on, and not speaking as a member of the committee, it seems that we have two processes going on - what sounds like a good talk, and who sounds like a good speaker. Maybe we should run two review systems - one with *just* names and not abstracts or titles, and the other with just abstracts and no names. That would give us a measure of who the community wanted to see at the conference, and what the community thought were great talks unbiased by the name. The committee would then take both these reports into consideration for the final selection. My extreme statistician hat gave me another idea. For each review, present a random speaker with a random talk abstract, and ask for a rating on the whole package. With enough randomized reviews, it would be possible to get a ranking for speakers and talks as well as a correlation between speakers and talks. Perhaps we could even suggest that if speaker A did talk C instead of talk B, more people would be interested! There may be ways to stop popularity-contest ballot stuffing - reviewers could get a random subset of the presentations for review, with no guarantee that their friend's proposal is going to be there - and prevent them reloading the page until it appears. Or you could present multiple random pairs of proposals and ask which of the two you'd attend. Committee hat back on, I'm glad we're having this discussion. Barry _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
