Open Stack

All,

Firstly: I apologize in advance if this ruffles any feathers and I'm aware
this is my first time as a track co-chair so I might be lacking context and
decisions that have been made in the past and am speaking based on my
4-year experience as PyCon US Tutorials Chair.

So, one of the main goals of a CFP system, specially one for open source
communities, should be to minimize the amount of subjective decisions and
prejudice in choosing proposals. This could be accomplished a number of
ways -- and admittedly none is perfect and there's PROs and CONs to each.

1) Anonymize proposals in the first review cycle
2) Require a proposal format so that a proposals could be, in theory,
judged by anyone even if they don't know anything about the subject matter
based purely on structure and details (say, proposal A is a better proposal
than proposal B or C because it has a more detailed outline and time budget)
3) Encourage/require speakers to post slides/videos from recent talks or
presentations (exceptions can be made for first-time speakers)

And there's a few more things we could do to make the process fairer and
much less subjective than it currently is.

So, for instance, after reviewing couple of dozen proposals in the track I
was assigned to I feel I could not make an informed and fair decision on
any of those proposals. Two-paragraph abstract and 4 bullet points is
absolutely insufficient to say whether a proposal has more merit than other
in an objective manner. At this point I'm unsure how to proceed without
resorting to "I know this person", "that other person is in marketing so
probably not a good idea", "that person is a PTL, so better give them a
spot", etc. None of which should have place in choosing proposals.

Best,
Ruben
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