Open Stack

On 12/9/15, 2:47 PM, "Walter Bentley" <walter.bentley at RACKSPACE.COM> wrote:

>My 2 cents are:
>
>
>
>* Cap it to 3 or submission per person

I mostly agree with all of these ideas, but especially the submission cap. I think it'll actually make submitters happier as well; I can't count the number of times I've heard people say "Man, I submitted 5 talks and they all got accepted. This summit is going to be hell".

>* Keep the number of speakers for a submission to a max of 3
>* For sure add in the new questions for the submissions and combine the abstract/short description fields.  Those additional questions will help the track chairs flush out the non-quality content or those who have no clue what they really want to cover and
> just submit talks just because.
>* Ask submitter to provide details on other speaking opportunities, blogs and/or relevant experience.

I'd be careful about this one. I agree we want to continue to raise the quality bar, but we also don't want to discount an otherwise good talk because the person proposing it hasn't done much speaking before.

I think at the end of the day, for me, the question really is: how do we get rid of the sale's pitches posing as talks? To me that is a far larger problem than poor quality talks. I feel like a submission limit combined with some kind of "not a sale's pitch" gate would keep the total number of proposals to a manageable size while giving us a higher ratio of quality submissions to junk.

>
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>
>Walter Bentley
>Cloud Solutions Architect – RPC
>Rackspace – the #1 Managed Cloud Company
>
>
>Mobile: 347-233-0562
>Email: walter.bentley at rackspace.com
>Learner | Achiever | Relator | Restorative | Individualization
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>From: "Niki Acosta (nikacost)" <nikacost at cisco.com>
>Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 2:55 PM
>To: Lauren Sell <lauren at openstack.org>, "openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org" <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>
>Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 2:44 PM
>To: "openstack-track-chairs at lists.openstack.org" <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) and hope to have track chairs decided by mid-January. Any thoughts on the process? 
>
>Thanks,
>Lauren 
>
>
>