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

[Sacha Chua]

Esteban Ordóñez <quiliro@riseup.net> writes:

>> Yes, a shorter, clearer message would be great! Would you or someone
>> like to draft one? Can we borrow ideas from CFPs from other
>> conferences that you like? :)
> I would just mention a first paragraph which is already in your text and
> add the titles (headers) of the rest.  People will ask and we could
> respond with the texts of the other headers.  Then, it will be no more
> than 100 words each.  Better if they are 50 words.  Nobody rejects
> reading 50 words.  But it might not be enough.
> I am not a very good communicator.  So I am not the best person for this
> job.  But brevity is undeniably a good policy.

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

I don't have a lot of e-mail time (mostly just squeezing in things on my
phone or when the kiddo is otherwise occupied), so I tend to prefer to
have things documented on a page instead of relying on copying and
pasting into e-mail. We could put them in collapsible headings or a FAQ
or something. But if people want to help with speaker coordination and
would like to take care of those e-mails, that could work too!

Sacha