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

[Feihong Hsu]

I think the problem with a totally community-driven voting system is
that the presentations focusing on the most popular, well-established
projects will always get more votes. That wouldn't leave a lot of
room for presentations about relatively new or obscure projects. 

I know that some talks this year were rather weak. The same thing was
true last year. I don't think this is as big a problem as people
think it is. It sucks for those of us who attend a bad talk, but even
a bad talk serves a purpose. If a talk was bad, it usually wasn't
because the presenter didn't put a lot of effort into it, it was
probably because they lacked conference speaking skills.

Speaking at a conference is not like speaking in front of your local
user group. It's similar in some ways, but the larger audience and
the higher expectations make it quite different. The amount and kind
of preparation you do for a conference talk is on a totally different
scale. So I argue that the only way to learn how to do a conference
talk is to actually do it.  A certain number of talks should be
allocated to members of the Python community who are not experienced
speakers (but of course they still have provide an interesting talk
proposal).

Some first-time speakers will do well, and they'll go on to speak
again at future PyCons or other conferences. This is of real benefit
to our community. Some first-time speakers will fail hard and waste
the time of everyone who attends their talk. However, even failures
are valuable learning experiences, and if these people analyze what
they did wrong, they might become stronger speakers (some people will
overcompensate in response to harsh criticism and become even
stronger than speakers who succeeded on their first try).

I probably wrote more than I needed to get my point across, but I
could summarize by saying that it's impossible to separate the wheat
from the chaff when you don't even plant the seeds. So let's plant
the seeds, and see what germinates.

Cheers,

Feihong

P.S. A few of you were (un)lucky enough to attend the practice run of
my Python.NET talk. It ran for 72 minutes (!) and was a big rambling
mess of a talk. If I had done that at PyCon, I would have understood
if people boo'ed me off the stage. After the practice run, I gave the
talk a significant make-over, in accordance with the feedback I got
from the audience. As valuable as the practice run was, I'll confess
that I was thinking about being lazy and not doing it at all! 

I came pretty close to giving a horrible talk at PyCon. As it is, I'm
not certain that I gave a GOOD talk, but I'm fairly certain that it
wasn't horrible. As my experience shows, succeeding as a first-time
speaker involves some degree of luck. Or maybe the lesson is to not
be lazy, but I don't think that's it because we're all lazy at some
time in some way. 


--- Atul Varma <varmaa at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if this idea is along the same lines as what you're
> saying
> here, but what if the way to choose what talks get busted is based
> purely on
> a completely democratic voting process within the community?  For
> instance,
> once all the talks are turned in, they're all publicly viewable on
> the PyCon
> website; they could even have comment threads where discussion
> could take
> place, e.g. potential audience members could ask the potential
> presenter in
> advance about their proposal, people who have heard the presenter
> talk
> before could provide comments, etc.  Then each community member is
> given a
> pool of, say, 50 points, that they can distribute between proposals
> however
> they like (or a different voting system could be used, I dunno).
> 
> Anyways, maybe I just repeated your idea using different words, I'm
> not
> sure... But it does seem like a community-driven conference could
> use a
> slightly more community-driven mechanism for selecting talks.



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