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#+TOC: headlines 1
* Timeline
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: timeline
:END:
Last year, these were the actual dates:
- July 17: CFP sent
- Sept 18: Original CFP deadline
- Sept 30: CFP closed after extension
- Oct 1: acceptances sent
* Phases
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: phases
:END:
** Drafting CFP
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: cfp
:END:
*** Considerations
Ooh, that's true, we could see if there are parts of the CFP that we
can remove or postpone. Here are some thoughts:
- We might not need the 10+20+40 structure in the proposal. We did
that before because people tend to propose longer talks, and we had
to do lots of e-mail coordination in order to squeeze everything
into one track. If we're doing multiple streams, there's less time
pressure, so we might not need to confuse people with those
requirements. I think it would still be good to nudge people towards
20 minutes for their prerecorded presentations (separate time for
Q&A) instead of 40 minutes, because it's good for people's attention
spans. As an incentive to consider a 5-10 minute talk, we can say
that 5-10 minute videos can be played extra times during the
conference to fill gaps.
- Choices:
- Keep the 10+20+40 structure so that people who want to propose
longer talks are nudged to think about shorter versions
- Strongly nudge people towards 20-minute talks, with repeats as
the incentive for shorter talks and extra coordination/waiting
needed for longer talks. People propose just the talk length
they want (and can optionally propose other talk lengths if they
want to be considered for them).
- We added emergency contact info, public contact info, pronouns, and
introduction to the submission form because we ended up going back
and forth with people in previous years, and sometimes we had
incomplete info and were panicking about how to reach people during
the conference. We could drop this from the submission form and do a
separate speaker information form.
- Choices:
- Talk submission, then speaker information form: less
intimidating for speakers
- Everything in one: easier for organizers
*** Lessons learned from previous years
- Ask for public e-mail or contact information, IRC handle in CFP
- Added to submit page.
- Be even more stringent about the 10/20/40-min splits. A lot of
speakers still default to the 20- or 40-min formats without
providing us shorter formats, and that puts strain on our schedule
and requires us to use a different template for the notification
(which can be confusing). We need to stress that not respecting the
format makes it harder not only for the organizers, but also for the
speakers themselves (since they will have to rethink their
presentation). Maybe we can have an e-mail template for a quick
reply that says something like "Just in case we need to squeeze
talks into shorter times, could you please also propose an outline
for a possible 10-minute talk that could get people interested in
your topic and point them to where they can find out more?"
- sachac: I'd love to experiment with rolling acceptances. If people
have a good 10-20 minute version of their talk and we want to
accept it in the program, it would be nice to be able to say yes
early so that they can start working on it. We can work with any
duplication of content in later proposals.
- Two people is the sweet number of reviewers to have for the
proposals before sending the notifications, and there’d be
diminishing returns with more. Two is enough to release the pressure
on SCHED, verify the metadata (esp. speaker availability), and
suggest a different ordering where appropriate. It can take a long
time to comb through the proposals (roughly 10 proposals per hour),
and whilst it’d be difficult to justify more in-depth reviewers,
other orgas can do a shallow-pass to catch red-flags or discuss the
submissions as they come in. Other organizers can always chime in on
topics they particularly care about so that their encouraging
comments or suggestions can be included in the acceptance e-mail.
- sachac: Who wants to help me with this?
- We extended CFP-end by two weeks this year, but that made it coincide
with speaker-notifs, and that’s awkward. Next time, we should only
extend the CFP by one week to avoid having to scramble with the
schedule until the very last day.
- Proposed dates in https://emacsconf.org/2023/cfp/ have similar
spacing, so yeah, we'll want to extend by only one week.
- Some people assume that they have to suggest longer formats even if
they intend their talks to be 10′ or 20′. We should change the
wording on the CFP to ask them to only provide alternatives for
shorter formats, not longer.
- Added a brief note to CFP.
- It was hard to squeeze all the org/hyperbole talk on day-1.
Generally, the people who submit these kinds of talk come from all
over the world, and US mornings are more accommodating than US
evenings when it comes to timezones. We might consider having two org
*mornings* rather than an org *day*; it would give us more flexibility
with those talks.
- Let's see if we can do two streams again. That was fun.
- We’re starting to reach critical mass on the org-talks. We might want
to consider splitting the org-talks and the dev-talks into two
distinct events to allow them to grow independently.
- Let's see if we can do two streams again. That was fun.
- We should associate time-of-day with CFP-deadline; otherwise, the
scheduler has to be on edge until the very end of the day. It’s worse
this year because we made CFP-end coincide with speaker-notif, so this
might not be as much of a problem next year.
- If we do rolling acceptances and we extend by at most one week
instead of two, this should be fine.
- It’s easier for us to extend beyond 5pm than to go before 9am
(especially for the West coast). Extending beyond 5pm puts strain on
European organizers and volunteers, though.
- Time pressure should be alleviated with multiple streams.
- Sometimes, ikiwiki on front0 took a lot of time to process the new
commits. sachac assumed this is due to a faulty regex parsing. We
should be able to find out more by looking at the logs from ikiwiki
after a slow commit.
- Seems speedy at the moment.
- Ask for preferred timezone in CFP
- Added to availability.
- Check with John Wiegley re: schedule - we always happen to coincide
with his work trips
- I checked with him and the people at his work don't have a schedule
yet, so we should go ahead and plan
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