Open Stack

On 08/17/2015 11:21 AM, Egle Sigler wrote:
> While I agree with you on some of the points, ignoring voting would
> essentially remove community from providing any input into the selection. 

See, here is the danger: this brief sentence makes it look like the
votes are the expression of the larger community giving  some form of
meaningful input. I argue the contrary. First, with thousands of
proposals nobody has the possibility to read and vote them all. So the
proposals voted are necessarily only a fraction.  Also, of all the
people rotating around OpenStack, few of them vote. This means that
*few* people find *some* talk proposals. Which talks are more popular? I
notice how well organized are companies like Rackspace, Red Hat,
Mirantis, IBM, Tesora and few others blogging about their proposals when
time comes. Have you seen the same things from smaller organizations,
individual developers, or research universities? I haven't, which leads
me to believe that this is only a popularity contest.

So I think it's a bad fallacy to consider the votes as the input of our
community: it's just the result of celebratory tweets and self-promotion
by few corporations and very few social-media savvy individuals. I have
nothing against the celebrative voting process per se, I just *don't*
consider it the vote of the "community": it's just a small part of the
community, the part that plays the social 'vote for me' game.

> Are you suggesting getting rid of voting all together?

no, that's not what I'm advocating. As I mentioned in my message before
I think the voting process is valuable for the *summit* as a whole and
for the community as a whole. It's a ritual, it's a celebration, it's a
preparation to the event, it's a collective, fun activity.

But I don't think that the individual votes are valuable at all: they
can easily (and are actually) gamed. I'm advocating to ignore them while
selecting the *individual* tracks.

/stef

ps The presentation from Mark Baker suffers from the same broken
assumption that the voting process is anything but a celebration of the
summit itself. It needs no fixing: it works very well for the purpose of
promoting OpenStack as a whole. Just don't consider it anything but that.