[OSGeo-Conf] presentation selection

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Hey,

wanted to raise a point about the selection of presentations for FOSS4G this year. Because of this tweet (https://twitter.com/pduchesne/status/332931071060619266) I had access to the community voting results.

One of my talks got selected (rated #31), another one did not (rated #53). 

So I thought this might be because they did not want 1 presenter to do multiple talks, but I see some other presenters having even up to 4 talks (as presenter or co-presenter that is). 

Btw, I am not complaining, since I think 1 talk is more than enough for me ;-), just want to make sure people understand the process and that we can improve it for the coming years.

But apparently the selection committee filtered out abstracts based on the words open and or free, which seems a weird and error-prone approach to me. My second talk was about GeoExt and since I thought since everybody knows GeoExt is about open source, I did not mention those words explicitly in my abstract. Someone had a great abstract on big data, but it wasn't selected because it can be used with both open source software and closed source software, and it's not about open data specifically. My personal opinion is that if the general public wants to see this talk, it should not matter if the abstract contains the words free or open.

Also, if this is filtering would be done, it should be done *prior* to the community voting phase IMHO.

Can the selection committee elaborate on the approach they used?

TIA.

Best regards,
Bart

-- 
Bart van den Eijnden
OSGIS - http://osgis.nl

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