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This file is automatically exported from [/2022/organizers-notebook/index.org](/2022/organizers-notebook/index.org). You might prefer to navigate this as an Org file instead. To do so, [clone the wiki repository](https://emacsconf.org/edit/).
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#+TOC: headlines 1

* Timeline

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
* Lessons learned from previous years

** CFP and review 

- 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