On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Noufal Ibrahim KV <noufal@nibrahim.net.in> wrote:
Do we really have so much advance talk submissions ?
We won't attract any advanced talk submissions because people who do that kind of thing see PyCon India as a large gathering of newbies with very basic talks.
I personally wouldn't submit a talk about anything advanced if I knew that most of the audience were first timers. Why would I? If I knew that the people who were attending are experienced, I'd be willing to put stuff out in front of them to solicit feedback and have interesting discussions. If most of the audience won't understand what I'm saying, why should I submit a talk at all?
If 40% of audience are non newbies, still there is high audience for interaction.
I know some friends who didn't submit a talk on distributed systems for ,atleast partially, this reason.
I still think we should have two track beginners and intermediate/advances which solve the problems. In future once our advance talk submission increase we can rethink.
Guidelines like - No first time speakers
For example we had this rule as part of Talk selection. The talk `Medusa: A much faster Python implementation based on the Dart Virtual Machine ` was given by college student and first timer. It was one of the well received talk and was considered advanced talk. - No talks on topics that you've not personally worked on for a period
of time. etc.
will reduce the number of talks drastically filter it down to a small pool of high quality talks.
I don't agree with your reasoning. If we keep it open like this, the talk quality will dwindle and we'll get more and more low quality talks which we'll filter from. We'll get "the best of the bad" and that'll be the maximum we ever reach. I'm for raising the bar so that submissions are good.
Well people will submit beginner level talks even if the description is advanced level talks. There isn't solution for this. Also this year we were never biased or had quota for beginner level talks. We were allowed to choose what we have.
In any case, we've gone by the "everything for everyone" approach for 5 years now. I'm saying, let's try the other route and see if it works better. If yes, we'll stick to it, if no, we'll come back to the current approach. No gain without experiment.
We can experiment without breaking current momentum. Having outreach program to more people working on interesting stuff may help the community in general. Having advance level talks is good but having only advance level is not great idea.
I'm strident about this because apart from the talk quality, everything is good at the conference. This is the only thing I've heard big complaints about and this, in my opinion, is the way to fix it.
Talk quality != advanced level talks.
I'm not intransingent about this and am perfectly amenable to being argued out of it. I'd just like discussion. I think there must be atleast a few people who agree with my point of view.
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