[EuroPython] Lack of diversity within selected talks

[Valerio Maggio]

Hi everyone.

On 15 Apr 2014, at 16:03, Stefan Scherfke <stefan at sofa-rockers.org> wrote:
> 
> Am 2014-04-15 um 15:07 schrieb Hynek Schlawack <hs at ox.cx>:
> 
>> - Having speakers have 3 slots is ridiculous, 2 should be a very rare exception.  So ask them which talk is more important and there you have some free slots.
> 
> I wrote an email to the EP help desk a few days ago and offered to withdraw one
> of my talks in order to give someone else the chance to present his/her ideas.

I did exactly the same, of course.

I do believe that **diversity** is a very important thing (in general), which turns to be even more important for a conference like EuroPython, where there are a lot of people who would like to contribute.
Thus different perspectives on both sides, i.e., talks' proposers and reviewers, are surely needed to make this possible.

This community and this conference deserve a very high quality list of talks, and there are many valuable proposals that are still waiting to be accepted. 
So not a problem at all in withdrawing one (or more, if needed) proposals to favour somebody else !-)

Btw, as for clarification, I would like to point out that the list of the talks reported so far refers **only** to the talks that have been accepted after the first round of reviews, i.e., they got only +0 and +1 ratings after the first round.
Thus, the organisers didn't make any additional decisions on these talks that changed the original results of the community voting/reviews :-)
They took the entire list as it was after the first round of reviews, filtering out training proposals, namely 72 talks out of 86 accepted (as far as I know, btw!)

That said, I would kindly suggest the organisers to publish as soon as possible some statistics about submitted talks, corresponding reviews and reviewers.
In this way, It would be easier to reason about possible remedies and workaround to tackle this situation.

For example, I'm wondering if limiting one single talk per speaker would be enough to reach the total number of talks required for the conference. Maybe yes, but only *numbers* can speak :)

m2c. 


All the Best,
Valerio