[Inpycon] Query regarding the proposal selection process

[Ramanathan Ramakrishnamoorthy]

Hi Pravendra - Thanks for bringing this up.  I am answering this as the CFP
workgroup co-ordinator for PyCon India, 2018.

While some of your concerns are valid, I would strongly suggest not to put
a total doubt on the multiple days of genuine efforts put by many in the
CFP workgroup.

To give some perspective, I will outline the events.
 - We waited until the CFP submission completion date (July 10th) and
started the review process after that.
 - To keep in context, we received 335+ proposals which were roughly 3
times the proposals we received in the previous years.
 - Our first focus was the Workshops - We needed to open tickets for that
separately and the sooner was better.
 - By the time we completed the workshops, we clearly understood that
providing feedback on individual talks was practically impossible - You
need to keep in perspective that the CFP workgroup was an open call and the
experienced people were pulling in a lot of their valuable time in the
process.
 - I can assure that no proposal was left behind and every single proposal
was reviewed by the category specific sub-teams.
 - We were still very delayed from the original target date of the
selection process completion (September 10th vs Original August 29th).

I understand your concern of "Where did my proposal go wrong?" and I can
confirm that you are not alone.  There were many great proposals which we
had to reject due to limited available slots.

Couple of things I would certainly agree
 - The mentorship process just did not go per plan. This was the pilot year
and I will agree this was a not a successful attempt.  We have a bunch of
learnings about this and I am sure it will be improved in the subsequent
years.  We might need to plan this well ahead of the CFP process itself.
- We should strive to provide feedback on every proposal - which translates
to starting and ending the process well ahead of time.  This again is a
certain wish and hope it will be addressed in the next year PyCon.

All in all, we put in our best efforts to keep the process fair and I can
proudly say the intent was successfully achieved.

As I mentioned on Twitter, I suggest you present your work in the open
space in the conference.  See you at the conference.

Best,
Ram.



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