Improved Selection Process for DrupalCon Munich

Jos Doekbrijder — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:05:48 +0000

Dear Drupal Community

During the preparations of the content for the Munich DrupalCon the responsible track chairs found themselves discussing - at length - the selection process for proposed sessions. Within minutes the issue of voting came up and after hours we found ourselves still talking of the problems, advantages, risks, correctness etc... of voting. To make a long story short, it became clear that most regarded the voting process as a means for the community to let us know what they like, but, and here comes the problem, past experience show that the results of the voting do not provide a good indicator of session quality, relevance, interest in the topic, or attendance.

Voting

I believe it is clear to all that voting as a popularity contest is not good. In addition, voting may give the wrong impression: getting the most votes does not mean getting picked to do a session. Voting puts external speakers at a disadvantage in comparison to popular Drupalistas and strong votes on "flamewar" topics might take focus away from otherwise great sessions. The issue is not new, and many have voiced their opinions in favor of a change. Among others, Morten - a long-time speaker, track chair and DrupalCon Organizer - published a proposal to address the inefficiency on voting (see http://morten.dk/blog/drupalcon-voting-waste-time-resources).

Voting done right would take a tremendous amount of thought, preparation, planning, and last but not least, (voting) time. As in any Base-Democracy there is an inherent obligation for the voter to study all available information to be able to make a well-thought-out decision. Try to do that with 400+ proposed sessions! Since this is virtually impossible voting becomes emotional and gets skewed. The result: voting doesn’t provide any valuable information for selection.

So how do we select sessions for this DrupalCon?

We will not have voting on sessions, we are strongly encouraging comments instead. We feel this can lead to more relevant feedback, both for track chairs and speakers. An added effect we are looking forward to is, that the better prepared a session proposal/description is, the better its chances are to receive positive and constructive feedback and the better the chances for selection thus are. For any track, the track chair together with the global track chair and possible others evaluate the proposals, the respective feedback and the presenters reaction to that feedback and then make a justified decision for selection or not.

Feedback is extremely important

Needless to say, we need feedback. We need constructive feedback. We need reasons why, or reasons why not. We need a situation where the presenters can work with the feedback on their proposed sessions that will help them improve their presentations and thus raise the quality of the session and the overall DrupalCon experience of all participants.

In this spirit, I am looking forward to a lot of high-quality proposals, constructive feedback and good sessions in Munich.

Jos Doekbrijder - Conference Content Manager

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DrupalCon Munich 2012 - voting

Improved Selection Process for DrupalCon Munich

Voting

So how do we select sessions for this DrupalCon?

Feedback is extremely important