[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G North America - Blind voting

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:06 PM, Martin Feuchtwanger <feumar at shaw.ca> wrote:
> I think this (Cameron's) is a terrible, outmoded concept, just reeking
> if the "old boy" network, "old school tie" mentality.
> Proposals should be judged at face value, not on some preconceived
> notions of what was good before now.
> Bravo to the organizing committee for suggesting blind (unbiased) judgments!

Cameron's claim is (correct me if wrong) that reputation, built up
over the *open* processes we use, is as good as, or better, an
indicator of presentation quality as the 250 or so words squeezed into
an abstract. Why bother with the abstract? [rhetorical question]

Conversely, I think that with blind voting, it forces all potential
presenters to up their abstract-writing game a notch or two, and
people can no longer sit back on their comfortable reputations and
just Ctrl-C Ctrl-V last year's abstract. Those abstracts have got to
jump at you. We get better abstracts.

A third way is to have two independent assessments - one for
abstracts, and one for presenters. That way you can assess reputation
and abstract quality separately.

This also lets you conclude things like "well, nobody liked the
summary, but everyone wants to see her talk" (aka the "lazy famous
person") or "nobody seems to know who he is, but everyone loves his
proposal" (aka the "exciting newbie"). The committee as ever has the
final word and can maybe prod the lazy famous people to rewrite a bit,
and encourage the exciting newbies to "tweet moar" and lurk less.

I don't think the results of community voting - especially if directly
personal as in my third way - should be made public for at least a
hundred years [slight exaggeration] in order to save potential
embarrassment. It would also mean the committee not having to justify
itself to everyone who ranked higher in the community vote than
someone else but didn't get included because we already had eight
PostGIS talks (or whatever). A totally open results system would
probably need to include justifications from the committee for every
presentation in order to avoid such sour grapes.

I'll stop now as its midnight and I'm probably over-thinking this.

Barry