[EuroPython] Scheduling call for papers and acceptance of talks

[Chris Withers]

Paul Everitt wrote:
> During the Plone Con in Vienna, I noticed lots of people sitting 
> outside.  I asked a few what were the reasons.  The main one was, they 
> liked to socialize. :^)  However, some folks also seemed disappointed 
> with the quality of some presentations.

That IS a shame :-S

> I'm interested in ways to address.  One choice is, as we've suggested, 
> ask people to prepare in advance.  Benefits: people don't throw 
> something together at the last minute, we attract people that are 
> naturally more prepared, and we have time to interact via a review process.
> 
> This is pretty well understood, for anyone that has done a refereed paper.

Indeed, but there is already a refereed track, or am I mistaken?

> Downsides: as Harald noted, we might scare off people that are good 
> presenters, presentation material isn't nearly as important as the 
> speaker (they should be minimal, in fact), and it increases the work on 
> Paul/Heimo.

More work, less dynamism... sounds like programming in Java ;-)

> presentation quality, let us know.   Equally, if people feel that 
> improving the quality isn't a needed goal, speak up on that too.

I actually thought the Zope track last year was pretty good...

> Personally, I think it is unfair to the 90 people in the audience that 
> paid good money to travel, to suffer through someone that waited 8-10 
> hours in advance to work on their presentation.

Let me counter that by saying if someone needs more than 10 hrs to get a 
presentation together, they probably don't know the subject matter well 
enough to be presenting it in the first place...

> speaker can pull it off.  In many cases, the presentation could have 
> used some refinement and practice.

Come on Paul, EVERY presentation can use more refinement and practice, 
just like all software has bugs to fix somewhere, or features that could 
be added...

> Thus, give some arguments from the point of view of the 80, not the 1.  
> How can we make this better for the audience?

I'm not arguing with this, and while I can see how the proposal could 
make for talks that are prepared further in the future, I'm not 
convinced that it'll make them better...

> Quite obviously, we can't make an informed choice on a presentation with 
> a title and 50 word description, unless we know the person.  That 
> becomes unfair to the new people who haven't presented.

Yes, this is tricky, well, I'm sure together we'll all come up with a 
decent process...

cheers,

Chris

PS: Another thing that is a possibility, but hopefully an unlikely one, 
is that if everyone prepares the talks in advance, people just read the 
presentations and don't bother turning up, so we still end up with 
everyone outside chatting ;-)

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