Re: Draft call for participation (maybe June 26?), lessons learned from last year

[Sacha Chua]

"jc@tlo" <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org> writes:

Hello, JC, all!

> “This year, we’d like to experiment with accepting proposals
> throughout the CFP process, particularly for 10-20 minute talks. If
> there are similar proposals, we’ll work with people so that the talks
> can cover different facets.” How is that different from the previous
> years?

Last time, we waited until the end of the CFP process to accept (pretty
much) everyone. Since we like to say yes to as many talks as possible
and we can probably use multiple streams to accommodate many talks
without squeezing them down too much, we can experiment with saying yes
to early submitters so that they can get started preparing their
presentations (max of 20 minutes committed; might be able to go back and
give them more time), which might mean that we can get a few recorded
presentations earlier, which would give us more time to do captions,
test our processes, etc.

Here's the count of submissions grouped by week last year:

| Week ending | Count |
|  2022-07-24 |     1 |
|  2022-07-31 |     1 |
|  2022-08-21 |     2 |
|  2022-09-04 |     3 |
|  2022-09-11 |     2 |
|  2022-09-18 |    11 |
|  2022-09-25 |     4 |
|  2022-10-02 |     7 |

We usually panic mid-way through the process (oh no! maybe there won't
be lots of submissions!), but then plenty of submissions come in at the
end of the CFP, so maybe we can skip panicking this time. =)

>> - https://emacsconf.org/2023/submit/
>> - https://emacsconf.org/2023/ideas/
> There are 2 “2021” links, which point at empty (idea-less) pages.
> Is there a reason why the pages were not used in the past 2 years?

Removed the links to previous years. People didn't add to them, so now
we can experiment with adding stuff we want to see. =)

>> - 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
> You mean for the proposal review process?
> If yes, I’m in.

Awesome. I sometimes have brain hiccups when doing fiddly things
(copying all the submissions, into the private conf.org file, doing the
right timezone conversion when copying availability into Org properties,
making sure everyone gets an e-mail, sorting the talks into a reasonable
flow), so it really helps to have someone else look at stuff!

> “As you think about your talk, consider whether you can squeeze everything in:
...
> If you’d like to propose a longer talk, add an outline of what you
> might add to the first part if you had more time to present (up to 40
> minutes, including Q&A).

Oooh, I like those nudges towards shorter talks. Let's try nudging people
even further towards the 20-minute one with:

    20 minutes seems to be the best length for a presentation: short
    enough to keep people's attention, long enough to get into some
    details.

    There will be time for questions and answers after your talk, so you
    don't need to include that in your talk timing.

    Here's an example proposal for a 20-minute talk. Your proposal
    would include the 10- and 20- minute sections:

    - 10 minutes: quick demo of the abc package working together with xyz
      package.
    - 20 minutes: same as above, with some customization options to
      accommodate a different workflow.

Pushed cfp changes

> +1 (maybe ask the org people to organize a parallel org conference ;-)

There was some interest in running an Org meetup at the last conference
(could even do breakout rooms), but no one stepped up to organize it. =)
We'll see!

>> - 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.
> I was not involved last year so I’m not sure I understand the issue,
> but +1

Ah, it was just me twiddling my thumbs and wondering when I could
consider submissions closed so that I could fiddle with the schedule and
send all the acceptances. Sept 30 12 noon America/Toronto? 11:59PM
America/Toronto? 11:59 near the International Date Line? I'm going to
try to be more chill about it and just check in on Saturday. <laugh>

Sacha