FOSS4G'13

Mark can you comment on the selection process.
Accepted/not accepted will go out today.

Actually, I just posted a reply. As with everything, not everyone will be happy however the se;ection process played out. But we tried to balance content that would be both new and old. None of the abstracts were in any way labelled "this is an important project and must have a workshop". Choices were made on the abstracts submitted, trying to make sure there was comprehensive cover.

BTW how do I post to a particular thread in a discussion list?

Are you subscribed to osgeo-discuss? Just reply?

Suggest starting a new thread with a new title "FOSS4G Workshop selection" since its getting a bit OT from the original.

Markus N is a bit upset about not having his GRASS proposal accepted. Seems GRASS is very thin on the ground at the moment (no pun intended) with only one presentation and no workshops...

Thanks. I just get the daily digest. I'll  try and figure 1990s technology out ;-)
Well you can't please everybody. There was no indication or suggestion from anyone that any particular workshop was more important than others. The selection was done on merits of the topic to appeal to a wide audience. I would almost suggest that if GRASS is thin on the ground, then perhaps not many would attend the workshop anyway.
The process was on the basis of:
- Is this an introductory session?
- Does the workshop, fit with the feel of the conference?
- Does the workshop cover an area of particular note now, such as mobile, sensors, big data, or of European note, such as INSPIRE?
- Would this appeal to a new audience?
- Would this attract a good number of people?

So that got us down to 31 workshops from 60+. Then we had to be more brutal.

I think you have to decide whether you are going to respond to individuals gripes or just lay out the process as above and go "individual correspondence can not be entered into or we'll be arguing all day" or similar.

There's a wider debate to be had about whether workshop selection should have a community vote system, but that's not how its been done and its not an argument for this committee (although we can have input if OSGeo decide to hold that debate) so we (as a committee) probably shouldn't get into that.

I'd vote for laying out the process as Ian's done above and perhaps saying that we think that in future it should be considered if workshops should be included in the community vote to keep things consistent.

Agreed. We should not get into individual gripes. I will respond, but need to jump on a train now, and say something similar to what you have suggested. Personally community voting sounds good but maybe for 50% of the slots, as there will be topics that the LOC will be better placed to feel appropriate, otherwise, we end up with strong characters pushing their own agendas, IMHO.

Actually, Matt, I've got to get on a train to London now for a couple of meetings and so may not be able to post for a few hours.... would you be able to post to the mailing list.....

Thanks,
Ian

FWIW I think that Markus and Jeroen's argument that "I'm a very important member of the OSGeo/FOSS4G community and have presented my workshop at every FOSS4G since the dawn of time" (OK I exaggerate a bit but that seems to be the gist) is a very good argument in favour of NOT including them and doing something new for a change, but there we go... I'm not going to say that on OSGeo discuss for obvious reasons!

Is this discussion related to this tweet from @Tim_bowden today?
"From the #DeptOfUnintendedConsequences: Training costs of some OSGeo projects set to rise as a result of @foss4g conf workshops (#Humour)".
I didn't understand - there has been no response.

Happy to reply to the list, can I get an opinion on the following before I do so please:

FOSS4G Workshop selection

Hi,

There has been a discussion on list recently about the workshop selection process for FOSS4G 2013 so the LoC thought it appropriate to try and clarify the process. Unlike the main paper selection the workshop selection is not currently included in the community voting system but instead carried out by the LoC, and in this case inparticular the Workshop Team. We've tried to ensure that selection was done on merits of the topic to appeal to a wide audience.

The criteria we evaluated on included:
- A good balance of introductory and advance sessions
- Does the workshop, fit with the feel of the conference?
- Does the workshop cover an area of particular note now, such as mobile, sensors, big data, or of European note, such as INSPIRE?
- Would this appeal to a new audience?
- Would this attract a good number of people?

While it's too late for this years event on reflection it may be appropriate to consider adding the workshop selection to the community voting model. I'll add a note in the lessons learnt doc to that affect.

We're now focusing on firming up venues for the Workshops and Code Sprint and ensuring we have infrastructure in place to make the event a success.

Thanks,

Matt.
FOSS4G 2013 

Hi Matt,

Hmm, knowing Jeroen and Markus, I think a couple of your criteria are going to get them even more riled- namely the "does the workshop cover an area of particular note..." and "would this attract a good number of people". Personally I'd take those two criteria out. 

It might be worth saying that we were keen on workshops that would provide a good cross-over between the AGI event and FOSS4G to try and attract new people, I don't know. I think they are going to grumble whatever you say (sorry)

Jo

FWIW I think you also need to apologise for not sending out the acceptance/rejection emails before the program was published- that was a bit of a mistake on our (collective) part.

Thanks Jo, 2nd draft:

Looks good to me :-)

Jo

Cool, once we've heard from Ian re. acceptance / rejection emails I'll post to discuss (then go and hide).

Personally I quite liked

Does the workshop cover an area of particular note now, such as mobile, sensors, big data, or of European note, such as INSPIRE?

Perhaps we should say that the LOC workshop group inevitably had to make some difficult choices but I am happy to go with draft 2 from Matt amended to include my suggestion or not.

Steven if it wasn't for the fact that Jeroen is talking about Geonetwork, and specifically  mentioned INSPIRE in one of his emails, I'd go along with that, but I think it's just asking for more trouble at the moment...

OK, I get your point Jo. 

I would say mix-wise our workshop selection is not much different from 2011.

Comms group chat in 10 mins if anyone wants to comment in on comms aspects of this situation.

Sorry for getting to this conversation late - was having lunch with Gary + train to London. I'd like to +1 a lot of the comments made in this discussion  we can't please everyone and the quality of submissions was a lot higher than I'd thought possible. We can't please everybody and to be clear, during the workshop selection, we chose submissions on merit in the workshop submission. We did not choose based on person or name. 

I've just been trawling through list archives for other evidence of disgruntlement, which might point towards lessons not being learnt. But no sign.

2009 outlined their selection process:

http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference-workshops/2009-March/000129.html

which did include a reviewing stage (though not clear who the reviewers were)  but a definite statement of "the final decision is with me" (Mark Leslie).

However the "lessons learned" concluded:  "I would then perform the selection myself."

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Lessons_Learned#Workshops

VERY applicable.

We had a full and frank discussion over the final 31. No cows were sacred, to coin a phrase. It would have been easier if there were fewer submissions of a lesser quality, but we tried to cut the program suitability. During our discussions, we extended to two days due to the quality, to ensure a wide range of workshops. I wholly disagree with the comment of their being similarities. I fear we can't please everyone.

You guys may like to know there is an osgeo conference workshops mailing list which has been used in the past to organise and herd workshop presenters and attenders:

http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference-workshops/

Its been dead since Sept 2011 but I reckon an email to OSGeo SAC should get someone the list manager passwords. Maybe the membership should be cleared out and started again for this year? Make membership a requirement of presenters?

The discussion about workshop selections seems to be dragging on on the lists.

I posted this response

@ Jeroen and other workshop proposers who were not selected

The workshop team have already apologised for a comms slip up which meant that we published the workshop selections without sending out the acceptance/rejection mails first. As the conference chair let me add my apology to theirs, we had intended to send out the mails before we pushed the button to publish the program, it was a case of left and right hands.

The team made their selections on the basis of the content in the abstracts, they spent a lot of time trying to select from approx 60 workshops, inevitably 40 odd were going to be disappointed. We also reviewed 230 plus presentations and had to say no to about 60. A dozen people spent 2 days in a face to face meeting working flat out to get to the program selection and then a whole load more work went into the tagging and publishing. It isn't realistic to expect us to explain in individual detail why we chose not to select each of 100 workshops and papers.

There are definitely lessons to be learnt from the workshop selection process and we will try to capture our thoughts on this in the wrap up.

I think we have got a fantastic program for the conference. I hope that, even though we could not incorporate every proposal submitted, you and the community will agree

Can we leave that as the final word and hopefully things will cool down.

Can the workshop team please confirm that they have now sent the acceptance/rejection mails

Hi all, just catching up on this thread. Welcome to the exciting world of trying to keep the OSGeo community happy :). I think the responses from Matt and Steven are good, as Steven said hopefully it will all calm down again. I would try not to get into a protracted email discussion. I think you've had fewer incidents like this than we had in Denver so you're doing well so far!

What's the chance of getting an extra workshop room or two? If we can we could consider adding a few extra workshops and cover some of the "big" missing projects

Just a thought

I think it was Mark who suggested an un-workshop session which is an interesting idea. We could potentially provide 2 rooms for a day during the conference, those wanting to run a workshop could advertise it on a whiteboard on the first day of the conference and delegates could sign-up to show interest. The 4 workshops with the most delegates signed up would then run on the third day.

What do others think?

One potential issue with this though is that it's a lot of work to prepare a 3-4 hour workshop, so don't know if people would prepare one if they didn't know they were definitely going to do it. But perhaps if you have some extra slots you could consider a community vote in response to the recent feedback to pick another 4 workshops?

Another thought: how are people signing up for individual workshops? There's no option on the booking form, is there? At what point would you know that there was massive demand for something, or zero demand for something else?

I've just been talking to Steven and we're warm to the idea of hosting some additional workshops to accommodate a handful of popular workshops that didn't make it into our selection. On our call last week Jeremy confirmed that we have the labs for the duration of the conference so we have room and I'm sure we can find volunteers.

What we're proposing is we look to provide slots for 8 additional workshops which would run parallel to the main conference (probably using 2 labs for morning / afternoon for 2 days). If there are no strong objections to the plan I'll contact Paul Ramsey to ask if he can run a round of community voting for the workshops that didn't make our selection.

Barry asked a question about signing up for workshops earlier which made me wonder if these are separately charged items? That is how they've been done in the past, is that what you are planning again?

Matt, as discussed, I think the best response now would be to contact all the people who's workshops didn't get accepted and say something like:
"While your workshop did not get selected by the LOC, due to unforeseen additional capacity, we're pleased to say that we can offer an additional 8 workshops at FOSS4G 2013.  We would like to offer the community a chance to vote for the additional workshops, so if you do not wish for your workshop to be included, please contact us asap"
Then have around a week of community voting- and simply choose the top 8 workshops. That should keep everyone happy (well, give them less chance to complain, anyhow)

Jo

Excellent suggestion Jo

Re sign up queries from Barry and Peter.

People are registering for the workshop days on the registration system at £60 per day (equiv to $95/100). We will need to have a sign up mechanism for them to opt for specific workshops, I don't think we have given any thought to that yet. Ideas?

@peter (and others) yes, the workshops are an extra £60/early £75/regular for a "day pass". "you will have the opportunity to choose your specific workshops after the program has been announced" which would worry me, especially if I'm booking accommodation and the workshop I want to go to might be a different day.

I think for that reason we need to get the workshop timetabled down Real Soon Now, and have some means for booking -or at least expressing an interest in - individual workshops just as soon, otherwise people will be buying a day pass and then not being able to get into the workshop they want because its full, and have nowhere to go for the rest of the day.

I'm not sure the day pass is a good idea - is this how its been done before? seems more logical to pay per-workshop, and vary the price by duration (full-day/half day) but maybe too late now.

Remind me: will the main timetable for presentations be available before
early-bird registration closes?

We have a few people waiting to see it before booking day passes.

Soon I think, Rollo will know more? If we don’t get it out in the next few days, maybe we should either:

- Extend early bird registration for day passes until say a week after the programme is published, or

- Allow people to change the day for a day pass after they have registered.

I think it's really important that the program is out before the early bird deadline - this is a key thing for many people I think. I would extend the early bird deadline if necessary.

From tomorrow I'll be able to work on the timetabling system, hopefully Rollo is working out the basic scheduling in his head and will be able to input it as soon as I get it all working.

Extending the Early Bird to allow people to view the timetabled program seems quite reasonable

Agree you will need a sign up mechanism for workshops sooner rather than later. We had maximum numbers for workshops in Denver, based on number of machines, room capacity and general practicality. We did allocate larger rooms / numbers of machines to more popular workshops (think possibly we had 80 for intro to PostGIS etc). I can probably dig out more detail on this sort of logistics stuff if anyone wants it.

Hi Peter,

Any details on numbers for each workshop would be useful to allow us to plan.

Thanks,

Matt.