We got 72 proposals through the CFP process. This post is about how we went with the selection of talks.

Rating Process

We’ve 4 keynotes and 2 invited talks. We have included a Panel Discussion and Lightning talks too in the schedule. That left us time for 9 selected talks.

All the reviewers, which is same as the organising team except Prakash, voted using the rating system in BusyConf. Each reviewer can rate each talk using 3 parameters:

• Content
• Speaker
• Applicability

BusyConf gives an overall score for each proposal based on the score given for each of the parameter mentioned above.

Guidelines

Ieally the job should be to select the top rated 9 talks. But we applied the following guidelines on the top rated proposals:

• Not more than one talk from same speaker
• Not to have more than two speakers from outside India to give more opportunity for people from India
• Not to have more than one speaker from the organising committee

Exceptions

One or two talks were selected with the exceptions when the review committee felt that it would be useful to the community.

Because of budget constraints, we wanted the speakers to bear their travel expenses. Some proposals got rejected because of this constraint.

What we might like to do differently next time

I had mentioned this already in my previous post about Schedule. But repeating again here:

• More conversations with the submitters to help people to make their proposals better.
• Public Voting to let people know what talks are coming in
• Notifying rejected speakers in time