[Foss4g2010] Attracting people to Barcelona 2010 event

[Volker Mische]

Hi Lorenzo, Marco,

Lorenzo Becchi wrote:
> This is not a definitive opinion but we think it would be really
> complicated to manage the voting system if, as we expect, we will
> receive a lot more of proposal than the previous conferences.
> We are thinking to leave the selection in the hands of the scientific
> committee, we already have the platform and we are moving to create
> committee as faster as possible.

The academic track should, of course, be selected from an academic
committee. But I think the general track should be selected differently.
For me the FOSS4G is a mainly geek conference with potential to do some
business. So the selection should be made by geeks (public voting) and a
special committee (OC/OSGeo/other people who know about the Open Source
_business_) to get some presentations in that are valuable for potential
partners and/or are interesting for government representatives (as a
major partner of Open Source are governments).

I agree, the public voting won't be easy, and the interface would need
to be changed as no one can go through all Abstracts. Alternatively the
public voting could be replaced with another committee that does the
selection, but that one should be open for everyone to join. Then that
committee can decide who is reviewing which part of the huge about of
submissions.

Cheers,
  Volker