[OSGeo-Conf] [OSGeo-Discuss] Conference selection transparency (Was Announcement: Call for Location global FOSS4G 2023)

[Steven Feldman]

I have been on conference committee for almost a decade, I can’t recall us ever having more than 4 proposals for the global FOSS4G. Each year there are different factors that influence our choices, I don’t recall a year when there was much doubt about who we should select. A predetermined marking system would not make our job any easier it would just lead to endless debate about the relative weighting of each of the factors
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Steven

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> On 13 Jan 2022, at 15:22, María Arias de Reyna <delawen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 1:13 PM Jonathan Moules via Discuss
> <discuss at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>> I don't think there's any need to reinvent the wheel here; a number of open-source initiatives seem to use scoring for evaluating proposals. Chances are something from one of them can be borrowed.
>> 
>> Apache use it for scoring mentee proposals for GSOC: https://community.apache.org/mentee-ranking-process.html
>> 
>> Linux Foundation scores their conference proposals for example: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/program/scoring-guidelines/
> 
> Am I understanding it wrong or this is to accept talk proposals, not
> conference proposals?
> 
> Scoring a contractor for a well defined project (as you pointed public
> administrations do), choosing the right person for a specified job, or
> deciding if a talk deserves to be in a schedule is more or less "easy"
> compared to decide who is hosting a conference.
> 
> If you want to propose a draft of score requirements for FOSS4G, I
> think it would be interesting to go through them and try to come up
> with something. Even if the scoring is not binding, it may help future
> proposals see what is the path.
> 
> My only "but" with this system (which I use almost always when I have
> to review anything and I intended to use for this FOSS4G voting) is
> that it is hard to come up with an objective system that counts all
> the variables. And if the score does not match the final decision, it
> may be difficult to process.
> 
> I have been on the GSoC as mentor with the ASF and true, we have a
> ranking process, but it helped us mostly to order the candidates and
> reject those that deviate too much. The final decision was not a clear
> numeric decision. When the difference is small, you do have to
> consider other things. And from what I have seen these past few years
> on FOSS4G, either there is one candidate that outshines obviously, or
> the difference is really small between candidates and it comes down to
> things that may not be even defined on the RFP.
> 
> And there's things you have to consider that a generic scoring system
> can't help you with. We used this system in FOSS4G 2021 to decide
> which talks to accept on the conference, where the community voting
> had a strong weight but was not binding. And we had to make some
> exceptions with good talks that were experimental but didn't get a
> good score and objectively numerically they were rejected. We also had
> to reject some duplicated talks that had a high score but we couldn't
> argue both were accepted. Which one to reject? Usually the one that
> had a speaker with more talks. But what if both have a speaker with no
> more talks? That's something you have to check case by case.
> 
> Which leads us that with the scoring there is less room for
> experimentation because the candidates will focus on getting high
> scores on specific questions. Not on offering what is their best. For
> example, the proposal we made for FOSS4G Sevilla 2019 in a pirate
> amusement park to celebrate Magallanes... no score could have
> predicted that.
> 
> So I may agree on scoring, not on binding scoring.
> 
> But first we need some draft to work on to score proposals :)
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