Re: [Debconf-team] talks team reportback (and block on meeting results)
Hi again,
On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 01:09:21PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On 06/03/2010 09:14 AM, Ana Guerrero wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 03:47:52AM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> >> In writing up the mail for the "not accepted for scheduling" proposals,
> >> it became apparent that we would encourage the authors of those
> >> proposals to schedule their proposal in some other room -- it became
> >> apparent that 414 Schapiro seems a likely candidate, and we might even
> >> be able to get other classrooms.
> >
> > Here is the problem we hit on previous years and lead in the creation
> > of the infamous "unofficial" track:
> > we reject your talk but you can do it "unofficially". There is not
> > difference with the "official" talks. At least not with the ones
> > schedules from the beginning (difference here: video recording)
>
> My understanding was that we were aiming to avoid the "official" vs.
> "unofficial" designations.
>
I did not explain myself well then. I tried to say that with those emails
we just were repeating what has done in previous years, and I really want
to avoid that.
> Also, the wording people came up with for the "reject" mails (see the
> history of [0]) is not terribly reject-y. I believe that the jist of
> the discussion was that talks not accepted today could just be scheduled
> in other rooms/empty slots later. And we certainly have empty slots,
> given the 3 rooms available.
Yes, that would be all again the "unofficial"/"no accepted"/whateber you
call it track.
> > we should not use more
> > than 2 rooms and in some cases just 3.
>
> with three rooms, we have more than enough slots to accomodate every
> proposal and still have space left (esp. considering that not every
> proposal will pan out in a talk). In what cases should we have 3 rooms,
> and in what cases should we have 2 ?
This is related to my idea of the unconference. You have 2 rooms and in
the cases something else is schedule in that time slot for the
unconference, you use the 3rd room.
However, if you were to use all the rooms for scheduling everything from
the beginning, I would suggest not putting 3 talk, only 2 in the fist slot
in the morning :) Also the last slot is another with few attendees.
> > As mentioned, we should not do talk selection and scheduling (room talk
> > allocation) at the same time. Firstly, we just should select the talks we
> > see fit and seem good for Debian and reject all that does not fall in this
> > category. Then we worry at how use the resources we have.
>
> this sounds like "official"/"unofficial" to me, which i thought we were
> trying to avoid. I don't mind it myself, though.
No, what I meant is when talks are rejected, they are rejected. If they want
to have them later in the unconference, it is fine, but they are not in the
Debconf schedule.
The idea is we have DebConf with the small tracks we added this year in 2
rooms, the talks there are invited speakers or talks approved by the talks
committe. And then we have the unconference for last minute stuff, if people
wants to put there their rejected ideas, I don't mind, but that does not
belong stricty to the DebConf schedule.
> > We have got very few submissions this year
>
> as i understand your mail, many talks from last year were submitted and
> scheduled at the last minute. as of today in penta, last year shows a
> total of 163 proposals total (10 undecided, 135 accepted, 18 rejected).
> this hear has 120 proposals, and the last-minute or on-site proposals
> have not come in yet. Is it really that much fewer?
We have more "social" stuff we did not have last year about ~5 submissions.
For those 163 proposals, about ~30-35 were last minute stuff. Some of
them 5? were debcamp sessions. Finally, in a few cases, talks were simply
renamed by the speakers...
So we maybe got 120-125 submissions last year without the social events,
it is about 20 more than this year.
BTW, there were rejected more than 18 just 18 of the rejected one were not
schedule as "non official"
(disclaimer: I was not in the talks committee this year, I was just in the
scheduling hell team. I was in the talks committee 2 years ago.)
> > Answering to "What should we do?" my suggestion:
> > - Accept 65-72 talks we believe are good for debconf. Send accept/reject
> > email. Publish list of accepted talks without scheduling.
>
> I am fine with this suggestion, though we might want to adjust the
> wording of the acceptance e-mail, since it implies all accepted talks
> will be in a large room.
Just one small comment, I said 65, that might look a low number because I
think we might end adding some extra talks explicitly for the DebianDay.
> > To rejected
> > talks add we are studying the possibility of a extra unconference talk that
> > does not need to be necessarily recorded and still to be decided.
>
> This is vague enough that i would be more annoyed to receive it as a
> submitter than i would be to receive an "unofficial" or "non-main" mail.
> It also doesn't match the criteria we thought we were using when we
> made the current cut in penta. While i'm personally OK with using the
> cut decision we made against this idea, i'd want to make sure other
> folks who contributed to the decision don't feel like the rug was pulled
> out from under them.
Let me rephrase it: "we reject your talk for the debconf program. If you still
think debconf attendess could benefit from your talk or you want to spread
your ideas, you can schedule it in the unconference that will be in parallel
to debconf". More or less that in nicer english.
FWIW, the message from previous years was even more confusing: "we reject you
but you still can have this talk"
> > - Keep allowing late submissions in penta.
>
> yes.
>
> > - Gather talks requirement and schedule the accepted talks in the 2 main rooms.
>
> why not schedule some of the smaller, non-video-needing accepted talks
> for the 3rd (smaller) room?
Because the idea of separation: 2 mains talk for Debconf official schedule and
3rd extra room for unconference. All the stuff in the main room is recorded
(whithin video team resources). The unconference is not recorded.
>
> > - In some moment, maybe 1 week before debconf look at the late submissions,
> > see if something late minute is worthwhile to be added to the main set of track.
> > Usually this is interesting debian stuff that would benefit of being record.
> > Look at the what there is left and study how to organize the unconference
> > track in a 3rd room. extrasuggestion: This does not need to be a schedule
> > organized in penta.
>
> yes, though i'd like to see it kept in penta so future organizers can
> see what actually happened.
You can copy it all after the conference is over.
> > This suggestion is assuming we only have video in 2 main talks, we tried to
> > put there the best material and we still allow and encourage last minute
> > talks without stress to video team because it is not recorded, and no stress
> > for the scheduler team because they do not need to update penta every 2 hours.
>
> However, we did not make the current cut based on who should get video
> :( we based it mainly on the relative scores in pentabarf ratings, and
> there is no "should get video" axis to score on. There are some
> incredibly relevant, accepted, "actualized" proposals that probably just
> don't need or even want video. There are some proposals that might
> reasonably expect video, even if they didn't have a terribly high penta
> rating. If those events are going to happen at DebConf anyway
> (Conference or Unconference, or whatever we're calling the distinction),
> and we have the capacity to cover them, we should cover them.
Video is not relevant in the criteria for accepting talks or not. It is just
something we need to coordinate with video team in scheduling.
I hope the idea is more clear now =)
Ana
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