Open Stack

Beth,

I respectfully disagree with your position on presenter vetting. As track chairs, we have a responsibility to curate good content for the attendees of the Summit. Part of the content is what each presenter has to say. Equally important is how they say it, and how well they will connect with an audience. (S)he should be able to speak in a manner that is clear and compelling. Given two equally interesting topics, one by a known good presenter, and one by an unknown, I’ll prefer the known quantity. The OpenStack Summit is a world class event with a large active community. Attendees expect high quality content, and we have an abundance of good submissions to choose from. If you submit a topic for a session, and there are zero videos of you ever presenting in public before, you’re not my first choice, plain and simple. I know several other track chairs that feel this way.

With that said, I encourage all efforts to make good content better. A program like the one you described would be terrific. Potential speakers can attend that program, record a video of a presentation delivered using those new skills, and that video could accompany their submission to increase their chances of being selected.

NEW IDEA: Give submitters a field where they can explain to the track chairs why we should select their session. This is session specific, so just a bio link is not a good fit. This should not be targeted for something that is included in the abstract, but will assist the track chairs in the decision making process. Maybe name it “Why pick me?”. It would answer questions like: Are you an OpenStack contributor? Are you a user with a production deployment? What makes your point of view unique or interesting? Are you a world leading subject matter expert? Are you really funny? Why will this session stand apart from others like it?

Some more guidance while I’m on the topic… Track chairs should be able to recognize “tired” content that has already been presented a dozen times before, and carefully consider if we should select that topic again, or use the spot for something new. I will argue against selecting any presenter who is overly negative, or is not acting in accordance with our community code of conduct.

Adrian

On Dec 9, 2015, at 9:16 PM, Beth Cohen <bfcohen at luthcomputer.com<mailto:bfcohen at luthcomputer.com>> wrote:

Folks -
I will weigh in on this topic as well.  Agree with the others that limiting the number of submissions for session for each person to 3-4 as others have said seems reasonable.  That would allow people who are on panels (which I personally like to attend) to be able to participate in more sessions.

Also agree that some way to get more information about the person submitting the proposal would be appropriate.  I personally, unless I know the person will reject out of hand any submissions that are missing specific biographical information about why the person is qualified to present/discuss the proposed topic.  Maybe any proposals that are missing critical pieces of information, should be rejected before they even get to the vote.

I do not agree that the person needs to be vetted for their ability to lead/speak a session.  While we have had some weak presentations, I think that it is important to give people who might be shy/not comfortable with English/or otherwise not good presenters an opportunity to speak.  One suggestion is to offer a couple of webinar training/coaching sessions on how to deliver a dynamic session.  I would be happy to volunteer to put something like this together.  I have a teaching background and have done extensive coaching on this topic in the past.

As for the track chair process it has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but certainly the people I have worked with as track chairs have always been great to work with.  Also suggest we take all the suggestions about the tools that I and others developed to help with the process of winnowing down the hundreds of proposals so that will be easier to do.

Beth

On 12/9/2015 3:44 PM, Lauren Sell wrote:
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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_____________________________________________________________________

Beth Cohen
Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.
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