[Foss4g2010] Attracting people to Barcelona 2010 event

[Volker Mische]

Hi All,

Marco Ciolli wrote:
> I specify that I have liked very much Sidney conference, but many people
> (and I am among them) strongly disagreed with the procedure
> used in Sidney that made people vote for or against abstracts through
> the web.
> I personally know some colleagues who decided not to participate Sidney
> conference after having understood how the selection procedure worked,
> independently from the result of the selection itself.
> We are talking about an Open Source conference, so everyone who wants
> should be allowed to participate and to present works. A selection
> should be done deciding what are the works worth to be presented in oral
> presentation and what are the works that can be presented in a poster
> session but nobody should be excluded because he has not enough friends
> who vote for him.
> A "scientific" committee should decide where to put the different works
> (oral scientific/oral general/poster) instead, as it generally happens
> in conferences.
> However, the web vote could be interesting to complete some information
> about the single papers.

It seems that the selection process for the Sydney FOSS4G wasn't well
understood. It was like that:
- Public voting on all Abstracts
- A special academic committee (around Thierry Badard) made the
selection for the academic track (AFAIK the way it works for academic
conferences, with reviews etc).
- If a academic presentation wasn't selected for the academic track, it
could've been still in the other track of presentations
- After the public voting the was a selection process with the people
from the Organising Committee (and some others, like people from OSgeo).
Of course their selection was based on the voting, but also on their
judgement. For me the public voting worked great. You get an idea what
the people want to see and the selection was really quite good IMHO. So
the selection wasn't solely based on the voting, which wouldn't make
sense as it might have been manipulated (as you stated correctly).

Cheers,
  Volker