On 01/27/2011 07:34 PM, Richard Darst wrote: > Penta supports selecting both a "track" and a "event type" at the time > of submission. You can see the DC10 fields here: > https://penta.debconf.org/penta/submission/dc10/event/new > > I forget when the tracks were added... people on the talks team can > probably remember. I seem to remember taking some submissions, then > looking through and seeing what tracks would make sense, and then > trying to get more talks for what they thought were good tracks. > > I think the event types were pre-decided... I believe that DC9 used "tracks" to distinguish between debconf and debcamp events. IIRC, DC10 worked like this: * we decided not to put debcamp events into penta at all. * we made it so there were no track categories during the submission phase (and hacked penta to not display the track option during submission) * we pre-decided a list of "event types", and removed/hid the old ones that we didn't want any more (in particular, we wanted to remove "keynote") * as submissions came in, we looked at them and looked for recurrent themes. We also talked among the organizers to see if anyone had a particular interest that they wanted to really bring out. * from those themes and interests, we came up with the set of "tracks", and manually put some of the proposals into the tracks. most proposals were not in any track. * we looked for one or two "track coordinators" for each track -- these were people who were interested in the specifics of the track, knew the topic, and were expected to be reasonable about representing the different work going on. Some of these folks volunteered themselves directly. Others were sought out privately and asked to help out. * the track coordinators were expected to review existing submissions for their track, encourage the submitters to improve lackluster proposals, and encourage new submissions if they felt a part of the track was under-represented. They did *not* get to decide whether a given submission would be adopted into the fixed schedule, but could give their own recommendation to the talks team. * during scheduling, i tried to make it so that tracks that ended up with a coherent set of events were scheduled on a single day, in the same room with a contiguous block of time slots. I avoided having two tracks running at the same time. In spite of all the scheduling headaches and logistical hassles around scheduling, i was reasonably happy with how the tracks turned out. It meant that a few sub-communities within debian had a chance to have an intense day of related conversations, and to figure out plans and projects for the future. It also raised the visibility of those sub-communities a little bit. If the DC11 talks team has no opposition, i would recommend doing something similar this coming year. --dkg
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