On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Raymond Hettinger <python@rcn.com> wrote:
Who would you rather hear speak about the future of Python, Guido and someone else? About the state of Twisted, from someone on that team or from a user who read the Twisted book? About UnladedSwallow or AppEngine, someone on Google's team or someone who has played around with it for a while?
This is where a 2 stage review process helps. Stage one it to group all talks with the same topic and do a speaker validation process to make sure the speaker of a given topic is an expert in that area, or failing a known or verifiable expert proposing a talk in the area then all talks on that topic should be passed on to the anonymized process to be judged based on their proposal.
Also, there are some folks like Alex Martelli whose talks I will seek out no matter what he's talking about (because it's always worthwhile).
This may be true, but should have little to no bearing on the talk proposal process because if his talks are always good then his proposals are likly to be good as well and thus get approval based on that
Likewise, it's not irrelevant if a speaker previously gave a talk that sucked.
This is true as well. And should be considered in stage one of the process, but a single talk that sucked I would say is not a basis to reject someone outright. I would say two poor talks @pycon in the past three years warrants a negative vote, but a single bad talk, unless the voter attended that talk in person, isnt justification for a negative vote.