On 04/16/2014 01:24 AM, Laura Creighton wrote:
In a message of Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:26:59 +0200, Martijn Faassen writes:
* Considering whether we want a self-selected democracy for anonymously
selecting talks based on individual merits, or whether we want to
involve other methods too. Say a smaller group of people that looks at
the overall balance of things.
I've never seen a relationship between the quality of the proposal and the
quality of the talk.
That's another problem, yes. That's also why I think looking at the
overall balance of talks can be a good thing.
> The thing I care most about is _who_ is presenting the thing.
>
> To give a concrete example -- Armin Rigo isn't a particularly good
> speaker.
It's not important in this discussion, but I beg to disagree. Armin,
being Armin, has a speaking style all his own, but it's highly
entertaining to me to watch him speak and he clearly has a sense of
humor that helps make his talks engaging to people.
He's been known to write some fairly bad proposals, as well. It would be
extremely simple to find somebody who writes English better than Armin does,
who speaks with less of an accent, and who organises his or her talks in such
a way that people who are not at all familiar with the topic do not feel
excluded.
And I don't care. While it could be nice to have a hypothetical PyPy talk
by such a speaker, if due to time and space constraints, I can only have one,
I want the one by Armin. I _always_ want the one by one of the principal
developers of the program involved, regardless of their merit as a speaker,
because what I want to hear is whatever the principal developers of the thing
want to show and tell me, precisely because of who they are.
I think that's part of being in a community; we know each other and want
to hear from each other. It's an important aspect of EuroPython, indeed.
If fostering community is part of the mission of the conference, then it
should support that. And I think it does that quite well.
I see though that anonymous speaker selection paradoxically risks
pushing that real desire to see the principal developers speak about
their project into the "underground", which is where accusations of "old
boys network" actually seem more plausible than if this speakers were
known in the open during selection.
But fostering the community also can mean trying to get new people
involved, with different perspectives and different backgrounds and
different ideas. I believe that can enrich the community and make the
conference more inspiring. So we should balance the two. Again, that's
why looking at the whole mixture of talks is a good thing, besides just
looking at each individual talk.
Regards,
Martijn
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