Open Stack

I agree with Niki's view. In addition, I'd like to add the following suggestions -

1. We should make our summit not just a place for OpenStack veterans to share their insights and experiences, but also a welcoming place for newbies to share their new ideas without feeling being judged or the barrier to entry. So, I'd like to suggest we allocate a portion of the sessions for speakers who never spoke before and topics that were never discussed before.
2. Panels are really fun and informative. It looks like we generally have good attendance for panel sessions.  Maybe we should require minimum 2 panels/track and invite folks who submitted but didn't get selected as speakers to join the panels. In that case, more people can have stage time.
3. Definitely "yes" on maximum 3 submissions/person (including panels). In this case, we can give stage time to more people. Again, my view is that our events should be more open, more inclusive, and not just limit them to veterans. This is the only way we can generate new ideas, new innovations.

Also, this is not really track-chair related; it has more to do with event management. I noticed that in Tokyo, some popular sessions were assigned to a small room with a huge overflow, and some sessions were given a big room with no more than 30% occupancy. I guess people generally didn't  RSVP ahead of time and decided to check out sessions in the last minute. I suggest maybe we should enforce that people who RSVP'ed will be guaranteed to get in, and people who didn't RSVP will have to wait in line at the door. This means we will need to scan badge and check at the door. This might help us with more accurate room assignment. In addition, it will give us data points on who attended what sessions, what topics are popular, etc. for future reference.

Just my $0.02,

Anni

[cid:image001.png at 01CBC2CC.A2FB0D70]
Anni Lai
Email: anni.lai at huawei.com<mailto:cathy.wu at huawei.com>

From: Niki Acosta (nikacost) [mailto:nikacost at cisco.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 2015 12:55 PM
To: Lauren Sell; openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [Openstack-track-chairs] Call for Speakers Feedback, Next Steps

My thoughts, for what its worth:

Cap it at three submissions per person, including panels.
Strongly discourage straight up product-pitching sessions.
Would be cool to review sessions to take a first pass at what actually makes it to voting. There were far too many sessions to vote on.
The voting system is kinda painful. It would be useful to see a list of sessions for any given track and stack rank them, versus voting on them one by one.
Requirement to the submission form:  allow someone to post a link to a previous recorded presentation. It would be helpful for trackchairs to review in the event there's a tie.

Also- I've noticed that some track reassignments happened too late- in some cases, after final selections had been made. We should really press for a cutoff date for track re-assignments that is far enough in advance of the final selections deadline to make sure track chairs are considering all of the sessions in the track.

:)

Niki Acosta
Cloud Evangelist
Cisco Intercloud Services
(e) nikacost at cisco.com
(c) (+1) 512-912-6716
(t) @nikiacosta


From: Lauren Sell <lauren at openstack.org<mailto:lauren at openstack.org>>
Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 2:44 PM
To: "openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org>" <openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org>>
Subject: [Openstack-track-chairs] Call for Speakers Feedback, Next Steps

Hello Tokyo Summit track chairs,

We're moving quickly to open the call for speakers for the Austin Summit next week and want to make sure we incorporate feedback from prior discussions on this list. Unfortunately, we didn't have much turnout in Tokyo for the Summit tools & processes session, where we were hoping to facilitate more discussion. We only had two people show up (outside of Foundation staff), so we primarily discussed the mobile app and reviewed the prototype.

Based on earlier feedback in this thread, there is a desire to manage the growing number of submissions while increasing the quality. We have two levers we could pull for the submission process, but need to make decisions by the end of this week:
1. Do we want to cap the number of sessions that each person can submit at 5?
2. Do we want to add any questions or requirements to the submission form? See suggestions below.

For #2, we are already making a few minor changes this round to improve session tagging and ask speakers for "links to past presentations" and "areas of expertise." For the session submission, we currently ask:

  *   Session Title
  *   Session level (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
  *   Abstract
  *   Short Description (450 characters max for YouTube and mobile app)
  *   Select track from dropdown
  *   Tags
I would suggest consolidating the abstract and short description to be one question (because submitters often copy/paste it anyway), and then ask a few additional questions:

  *   Who is the intended audience for your session? Please be specific.
  *   What is the problem or use case you're addressing in this session?
  *   What should attendees expect to learn?
We are also making a few changes to the tracks, primarily grouping them into content categories to better promote and layout the content across the week.

Finally, we will very soon need to select the next round of track chairs. The Foundation has typically accepted nominations from the community and appointed track chairs based on subject matter expertise, contributions, working group involvement, etc. To help bring in new perspectives, one proposal was to ask track chairs to decide two people from their team who would continue for the next cycle and nominate two new people from the community to keep things fresh. We've gotten a lot of feedback that another community vote for track chairs is not desirable, but we could more broadly communicate the window for nominations. We're accepting nominations now (email summit at openstack.org<mailto:summit at openstack.org>) and hope to have track chairs decided by mid-January. Any thoughts on the process?

Thanks,
Lauren
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