I feel that as recurring Content Lead, I should join and answer this thread, even if it has been mostly answered. Holger Levsen dijo [Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 01:36:46PM +0000]: > > It seems talk/event proposals go into a black box until approved > > by a "secret" committee, or discarded. > > the members of the content team are public, there is not secret > committee. Right - I feel Dan relates to Content as "secret-handling committee". Which is closer to truth. > > In fact > > https://debconf18.debconf.org/cfp/ > > doesn't mention that proposals are secret, which is quite different than > > one would expect with Debian, and > > in 19 years of DebConfs AFAIK you are the first to bring this up, so I > dont think this unexpected or a surprise. > > also this is how all conferences i know operate. there are other models, > like barcamps, however, which operate differently. There are many things that are not handled public within Debian, even within DebConf. Say, choosing who gets funded (both for travel and for food/accom bursaries) is not and should never be public information. Prospective approaches to sponsors should also be kept secret as well. Proposed talks and activities are also quite sensitive, IMO. As Holger says, we have always handled this process in private, and I don't expect us to change it soon. An important part of a conference is coming up with the best possible lineup of talks as a coherent, planned schedule, and that unfortunately means rejecting some. > > My worry is, with this "closed source" model, maybe many valuable > > talk/event ideas will be missed/skipped/lost/not understood therefore > > discarded. > > there's always lightning talks. There are many options for people whose talks are not approved. First and foremost, we have the "self-scheduled talks". Main differences? 1. They are not part of the official schedule, announced a couple of weeks before the conference 2. They are usually held in smaller rooms, although sometimes they can take a space in our "official" rooms (although this often only happens when there was a cancellation, or with the few "holes" we didn't fill in the schedule) 3. They do not have video recording nor streaming (as we cannot afford enough video gear and, mostly, volunteers to cover them). You can see last year's schedule¹ — Everything scheduled in the Potato and Woody rooms was self-scheduled. You can look at the details of the process in the announcement I made to debconf-announce². I guess a similar scheme can work this year. ¹ https://debconf17.debconf.org/schedule/ ² https://lists.debian.org/debconf-announce/2017/08/msg00002.html > > Nor is there any "public oversight" process where we can see if it was > > 90 out of 100 ideas were rejected, of just 2 out of 12, etc. > > you are free to join the content team. Yes, you are free and welcome to join us. - Gunnar Content Team
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature