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

[Martin Maney]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:34:21AM -0500, Ed Leafe wrote:
> 	Unfortunately, the description of a proposed talk can have little to do 
> with the quality of the talk. There were several talks that I had 
> anticipated eagerly last week, based on the description, only to find that 
> they were boring and uninformative. Conversely, I went to a few that didn't 
> sound all that interesting on paper but were very engaging in person.

Yep.  The academic method is to ignore - indeed, to hide - the identity
of the author from reviewers in order to avoid so far as possible bias
based on personalities.  That can work pretty well for choosing what
papers to publish - the work the reviewers see is exactly what will be
published.  But I think I have to come around to the other side in this
case, because when what you're reviewing is some sort of written
sketch, or perhaps a draft version of the slides, for a proposed talk,
there's a hugely important gap between what the reviewers see and what
gets "published".  And in this case knowing the author's track record
as a speaker very likely does more good than harm - as many more than
Ed have said in one way or another, an intrinsically interesting
subject won't make up for a poor presentation, or at least not as well
as a good speaker can make up for a less than exciting [or so you
thought it] topic.  Of course best is when the subject and the speaker
are both first rate, and if reviewers have no basis for judging the
speaker, they are literally working half blind.

Of course all this pales into insignificance next to the clear and
pressing need to schedule 2009's pycon so that it overlaps the working
season of the water taxis, which resume service today!  <wink>

-- 
Allen Funt was one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century.
His informal experiments and demonstrations on "Candid Camera"
showed us as much about human psychology and its surprising limitations
as the work of any academic psychologist.  -- Daniel Dennett