[Foss4g2013] presentation selection

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 2:49 PM, Bart van den Eijnden <bartvde at osgis.nl> wrote:

> 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.

 We did *not* purely filter out based on words.

 We looked at the title, short abstract, and long abstract. If from
those items we could not see a  free/open-source, open-data, or
geospatial angle, we *thought carefully* about whether that should be
included in the conference.

> 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.

 Yes, we have enough expertise on the panel to know our open source
packages. Anything we didn't know, we looked up. However we can't look
up something omitted from an 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.

 An abstract that doesn't mention any open geospatial technology could
well be about doing analysis in ArcGIS or Oracle Spatial. Its not the
committee's job to second-guess the presenter or ask the presenter for
clarification - the abstract is space enough to provide clarity and
full details.

> 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.

 Again, we did not filter on the words. We took the totality of the
submission and checked appropriateness for the Free and Open Source
for Geospatial Conference, amongst the other criteria.

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

 Personal opinion: there's no point - the outcome will be the same, it
will just require a committee to review everything before and after
the community voting. There were very few inappropriate submissions.

> Can the selection committee elaborate on the approach they used?

 I think we've discussed this at great lengths on this and other
mailing lists. Basically: First pass: include community vote top 100.
Second pass: include committee vote top 100 (giving us ~130 included).
Discuss, eliminate anything inappropriate. Next pass: include lower
ranked community votes. Next: lower ranked committee votes. Check for
multiple submissions, similarities with workshop sessions, and make a
decision on near-duplicates (which may include rejections, choices, or
mergers). Keep going until coffee runs out or all slots filled. We did
not run out of coffee.

I think fuller details will be posted to the lessons learned/cookbook
wiki pages.

Barry