On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:06 PM, Martin Feuchtwanger <feu...@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 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss