Re: [Debconf-team] talks team reportback (and block on meeting results)

[Jimmy Kaplowitz <jimmy@debconf.org>]

Hi,

I'll not get involved with most of the substance of this discussion since I
trust you all to do something reasonable and I need to mostly refocus my
energies toward other DebConf and non-DebConf matters. A couple of minor
responses:

On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 03:27:16PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> who or what are the "on-the-ground schedulers"?  How are they expected
> to decide things?  Are these people (or machines?) up for accepting the
> possible workload we're setting up here?

I think the idea is people on site who are willing to hear scheduling requests
from attendees and fit them into penta as appropriate. We already had at least
one generally-informed offer to do that (gwolf) and there will likely be
others. Gunnar, please correct me if I misunderstood. :)

> I'd say that we have v-t coverage options that the submitter or
> presenter should be able to choose:
> 
>  * need (e.g. remote participants)
>  * want
>  * don't care
>  * do not want

That would be good, yes. Wording counter-suggestion:

* important (e.g. remote participants, historical value)
* want
* don't care
* should not happen (e.g. private or personal discussions)

I'd be OK going with either wording, but I think mine is slightly clearer and
more accurate. Not a strong preference.

It may or may not be worth doing this in penta for DC10, depending on how much
the schedulers can figure out from a mixture of common sense and asking around,
how many penta hacking man-hours are available, and how worried we are about
breaking things. (I'm still willing to help if we do it in penta for DC10.)

> If there was a way for attendees to indicate "i'd like to attend this
> talk", that might also help the schedulers decide which rooms are
> appropriate.

There have been feedback mechanisms in penta for post-talk feedback (currently
not enabled for dc10 for obvious reasons), but I'm not sure if those have
always been sufficiently publicized to attendees to result in a representative
opinion sample, nor if anyone has ever used that data for anything. This isn't
quite the same thing as you're proposing, but for speakers or topics that have
been in prior debconf events it might still help.

I don't think your exact idea exists now, but I might be overlooking something.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy@debconf.org