[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham update
All the news that's fit to print from your FOSS4G 2013 committee.. The biggie is that the deal is now done with Transactions in GIS that a number of papers from the Academic Track submissions will be accepted into the journal for publishing. TGIS as it is known, is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes original research articles, review articles, and short technical notes on the latest advances and best practices in the spatial sciences.. The attraction of this for academics is that published papers in high-impact journals are what we live for. The AT Subcommittee is now busy putting together a review team for the submissions, and also writing the call for papers to go out soon. All this should bring in some very strong submissions to the Academic Track of the conference. Elsewhere, progress continues on the web site design and logo. We've had a few logo proposals, and have settled on something that evokes the English autumn. At the time of the conference the leaves will be starting to turn, and Sherwood Forest will be a magnificent place to explore if you wish to go on a chivalric quest away from the safety of the GeoCamp - the giant marquee that will form part of the conference location. If Robin Hood should capture you, just tell him you develop Open Source applications and he'll set you on your way. Other discussions have been going on about sponsorship, not having conference bags, social trips (caves anyone? http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/caves-of-nottingham_11.html), getting enough internet bandwidth, and a big discussion about how to review presentations - which I'll post about shortly. Barry ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham update
On Oct 1, 2012, at 8:26 AM, Barry Rowlingson b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk wrote: social trips (caves anyone? http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/caves-of-nottingham_11.html), Even though Kimbereley is no more, how 'bout ye olde trip to jerusalem? http://www.triptojerusalem.com/ -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process
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. Barry ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process
On Oct 1, 2012, at 9:10 AM, Barry Rowlingson b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk wrote: * some names are big draws, and it would be disappointing to not have someone because their abstract wasn't that exciting. If they don't have anything interesting to say, they should not be big draws. Selection should be on the character of content rather than the size of the badge. -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process
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 Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process
I believe that for the general program, we should publish both the presenter and abstract. Reasons: 1. I'm attracted to a talk by both the topic and the presenter. I'm more likely to listen to a talk by someone who has a deep knowledge of a topic, which typically equates to someone with a big reputation. 2. And I think it is appropriate that people who have committed much time to the Open Source community, and hence have built up a big reputation, are allowed to be recognised by the selection community. 3. It also makes good business sense to the FOSS4G conference, as big names on the program will likely attract more delegates, and will likely have the delegates going away satisfied that they have seen presentations that they wanted to see. 4. The alternative of only seeing an abstract when voting is that anyone who can write a good abstract can potentially present on a topic, even if they don't have a deep insight in the topic of interest. On 2/10/2012 4:59 AM, Schlagel, Joel D IWR wrote: I believe anonymous reviews has a place as a component of paper selection - as a compliment to editorial review and professional judgement.FOSS4G conference is the number one marketing opportunity for the OSGEO community. We should make a deliberate effort to have a balance between inward focused technical / developer oriented presentations and outward focused policy / success / benefit type good news presentations. -joel From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] on behalf of Paul Ramsey [pram...@opengeo.org] Sent: Monday, October 01, 2012 2:43 PM To: Volker Mische Cc: osgeo-discuss Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process 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 volker.mis...@gmail.com 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,
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
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. Bruce On 2/10/12 9:36 AM, Cameron Shorter cameron.shor...@gmail.com wrote: I believe that for the general program, we should publish both the presenter and abstract. Reasons: 1. I'm attracted to a talk by both the topic and the presenter. I'm more likely to listen to a talk by someone who has a deep knowledge of a topic, which typically equates to someone with a big reputation. 2. And I think it is appropriate that people who have committed much time to the Open Source community, and hence have built up a big reputation, are allowed to be recognised by the selection community. 3. It also makes good business sense to the FOSS4G conference, as big names on the program will likely attract more delegates, and will likely have the delegates going away satisfied that they have seen presentations that they wanted to see. 4. The alternative of only seeing an abstract when voting is that anyone who can write a good abstract can potentially present on a topic, even if they don't have a deep insight in the topic of interest. On 2/10/2012 4:59 AM, Schlagel, Joel D IWR wrote: I believe anonymous reviews has a place as a component of paper selection - as a compliment to editorial review and professional judgement.FOSS4G conference is the number one marketing opportunity for the OSGEO community. We should make a deliberate effort to have a balance between inward focused technical / developer oriented presentations and outward focused policy / success / benefit type good news presentations. -joel From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] on behalf of Paul Ramsey [pram...@opengeo.org] Sent: Monday, October 01, 2012 2:43 PM To: Volker Mische Cc: osgeo-discuss Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G presentation review process 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 volker.mis...@gmail.com 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
