[Chicago] selecting talks Re: [PyCON-Organizers] Talk slot durations (was: FWD: Re: Pycon disappointment)

[sheila miguez]

I'm moving this thread here because I think my reply is too
hare-brained and informal for the organizers list. I hate lengthy
blahblahblahs on how things should get done and would like some
concrete way to test out ideas so that we can cut the crap and get on
with it. where "it" is more fun.

2008/3/21 Atul Varma <varmaa at gmail.com>:

> I like this idea of people having to "prove themselves" to some extent to
> present at PyCon, and I wonder if there's a way to integrate this kind of
> concept with local Python interest groups [snip]

I think the pycon organizers should find a way to test ideas being
discussed in these threads.

Perhaps we could test ideas on previous conferences. e.g. apply
proposed selection procedures to historical data sets, and judge the
resulting conference models with the historical outcomes. Which
algorithm rejected/selected what were considered high quality talks,
which algorithms selected talks that were not selected in the
historical conference? &c.

We won't have the benefit of knowing the quality of talks that didn't
go in to previous conferences (unless rejected talks were given
somewhere else and we have that data), but perhaps we have enough data
to run through voting scenarios on past conference talks to compare
generated scores with actual talk quality.

Alternatively, If we can obtain access to data from upcoming
conferences we could run through scenarios to compare hypothetical
model against actual results.

If this is easy to test, we could at least get an idea of "holy crap
that method sucks!" though perhaps they will all be too close to call.


This is just something I was pondering whilst thinking of different
ideas on voting and also ranking talks to consider scheduling--Randall
Monroe once had a voting scheme on ideas for the perfect date, perhaps
similar to the voting schemes he uses on sites like
<http://bestthing.info/algorithms.html>. (loosely based, he says, on
Condorcet voting criteria)

Also, being a gamer, I thought of the voting system with different
criteria for giving voters more points to vote on talks. and talks
would have different costs for voting. by analogy, designing stats and
leveling up characters.

-- 
sheila