Open Stack

Since the total # of votes cast per proposal, not just the averages, are visible to the track chairs I believe it's easy to see which have been pushed hard through promotion as opposed to "organic" discovery. 

We also developed an algorithm to show the talks which had less overall visibility (read: votes of any kind) more often to make the results of the votes ON those talks more meaningful, but unfortunately ran into a bug at the last minute and had to pull that feature. I'm hopeful it can return for austin. 

I'm not saying the data is perfect, but neither is it useless imho. It's just data, and I think it does have some value, if carefully considered. One of many data points to consider.

Ultimately the track chairs have to make judgment calls. If they choose to ignore the voting data altogether, that's certainly their call as well. 






> On Aug 17, 2015, at 1:56 PM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano.maffulli at dreamhost.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
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