Last updated by lewisnyman on Thu, 2014-08-21 17:23
This year I had to opportunity to co-chair the frontend track for DrupalCon Amsterdam with Ruben Teijeiro. It’s great fun to work closely with the DrupalCon organisers and the other track chairs, who are all so hard working and smart.
It’s a big responsibility to chair a DrupalCon track. It’s our job to ensure that the attendees come to DrupalCon, have a great time, and leave feeling inspired and excited to get back to work. We also have have to be accountable and fair in the way we select sessions, removing any potential bias and working with presenters so they are aware of the expectations of the track and the audience.
I’ve learned so much as it’s my first time being a track chair, part of me is eager to do it again with experience in hand. It’s also great to see other members of the community bring their own flavour to the track.
What do track chairs want from a session submission?
One of the aspects that track chairs have to consider when selecting sessions is speaker experience. The expectations at DrupalCon are higher than local camps so there is extra pressure to have consistently high quality sessions. We have to research and consider:
- The speaker’s previous experience.
- The history of the proposed session, is it brand new or has it been vetted in front of an audience already? Videos from camps are really helpful here.
- Any feedback from previous sessions that can give us more insight into the quality of the speaker or the content.
At the moment, track chairs act like private detectives, using their Google skills to find a speakers history and search for any feedback or videos. We also look through historical data that exists from previous DrupalCons, and notes from previous track chairs. If we’re lucky, the session submitter has left links to previous talks.
This is a tough job, and it’s a struggle to do this equally when you have as many as 128 session submissions for your track (well done Pedro!). There were 510 session submissions to DrupalCon Amsterdam in total. As you can imagine, there are a lot of spreadsheets involved.
What do session submitters want?
As someone who has submitted sessions and spoken at three DrupalCons, it’s easy for me to imagine from the point of view of session submitters.
I want to be able to easily present my speaking history so I have the best chance of being selected for future conferences.
What do conference attendees want?
- I want to see the best sessions at DrupalCon
- I want to be able to provide feedback for sessions that I know will have a positive and constructive effect on future cons and camps.
With all that in mind, how is this for an idea:
Should we embrace joind.in for all Drupal events?
How good would it be for session submitters if all they had to do was link their joind.in account to the DrupalCon site and have their entire speaking history, with any videos and feedback, all in one place? This would be great for track chairs, making it easy to access the entire speaking history in one click.
Here’s a test page for DrupalCon Amsterdam - https://joind.in/event/view/2355
In order for this to work, it’s not enough for just DrupalCon to integrate with joind.in. Every DrupalCamp should publish content to joind.in in order to guarantee that a speaker in the Drupal community has their full history in one place.
Joind.in is used widely within the PHP community, most PHP conferences have a presence on joind.in. It could be a useful marketing tool to attract PHP developers to Drupal.
On the other hand, joind.in’s rating system is slightly different to our current rating system. All comments are public but It’s possible to post anonymously, which doesn’t count towards the overall rating. There is a discussion to be had on whether the rating system causes a natural inflation bias as reviewer’s name is attached to a comment.
Lanyrd is used widely within the web community and has a great API but lacks a rating system.
Is this something we should push towards as a community? Let me know what you think.
Comments
I think it's a great idea,
I think it's a great idea, and I have now registered and RSVP'd as yes for DCon Amsterdam.
Past Drupal events that have used the platform Drupal camps in Chicago, Vienna, North West (England), MidCamp,
The only other future event is Drupal Day Bilbao, but we can request other camps to be listed.
Yes to the idea, maybe to the specifics
For background: I was the local frontend track chair for Portland, and one of the global frontend track chairs for Austin. (And from one track chair to another Lewis, the frontend lineup for Amsterdam looks awesome!)
I totally agree that being a track chair and trying to ferret out everyone's speaking history is time-consuming and frustrating.
What I really wish — and I realize this intersects only partially with the proposal above — is that drupal.org provided a way for all DrupalCamps to submit videos and slides from their events. This wouldn't even need to involve video hosting — the videos could live on YouTube, Vimeo, archive.org, etc. But there's a huge amount of knowledge from camps that just gets lost, especially since camp organizers and sites change from year to year and it's often hard to find old listings. Even in the immediate, though, unless camp organizers or individual speakers post their video/slides to a Drupal Planet–syndicated blog, it's unlikely anyone outside of that local region will ever see it.
Having a searchable database of Drupal presentations would not only be interesting from a historical standpoint, but would be damn valuable too, and I'd venture so far as to say I'd be happy to see some of my Drupal Association dues going toward building such a thing.
Increasingly, of course, we're having speakers from outside the Drupal community speak at Drupalcon, certainly in the frontend track but as D8 pushes forward in other tracks as well. So having a repository of previous Drupal talks wouldn't fit all the cases.
That said, picking any one third party tool isn't going to fit all the cases either. Lanyrd is much more widely used, as you noted. So I wonder if we'd have to build something that would accommodate multiple tools, because requiring joind.in would force some nontrivial number of people outside the Drupal community to set one up just to submit to our cons.
A quicker solution, though, would be to make the "speaking history" field in Drupalcon session submissions more specific about what we're looking for, perhaps even splitting it up into multiple fields. For instance:
Link to speaking history
(For instance joind.in, Lanyrd, SpeakerDeck, Slideshare, a page on your site listing prior speaking, etc.)
Top two or three presentations/speaking engagements
(Describe presentations you are most proud of, including a short description of the topic of each. Links to slides or especially video are very helpful.)
I'd venture to even make the first of those fields required, because if a speaker can't even muster up a listing of past speaking on their own blog to provide us a link to then I'm not sure they're ready to speak at a con.
tl;dr I do think we need to request more of speaker applicants, but I think we could do simpler things in the near term and I worry about the limitations of adopting a specific tool in the long term.
And I want a DrupalCamp content archive :)
Thanks for the commends and
Thanks for the commends and ideas! Originally I was thinking of something like a common user profile that could be kept up to date and referenced across all conference sites. It feels like something that is achievable but it feels nicer to user an external service instead of rolling our own again.
A permanent session repo would be great, I've suggested something like http://archive.dconstruct.org before.
I wonder if we could use a service like joind.in through an API so users can still submit sessions through a Drupal site that would then create the event content on joind.in/lanyrd/etc. That wouldn't require a joind.in account.
I like the API idea
I like that a lot, especially if it's either/or (i.e. if you already have an external account, you can just point to it).
Drupal people are largely going to want to keep everything in their d.o account and many may not have an external account. Non-Drupal people might resent having to create a d.o account if they already use joined.in/Lanyrd/etc. So this would make it easier on both camps.
And I completely understand that a session repo is a bigger project than this, I just wanted to throw it out there for a long-term vision :) Even if it existed, of course, we'd need a way to point to non-Drupalcamp presentations, so this would be a necessary step either way.
The API exists already and
The API exists already and you can do quite a bit with it, although speakers would need an account. We're working on updating our registration and "sign in with ..." features ... maybe d.o would be an obvious identity provider to add!
Great idea !
Great idea !
-Pol-
Listing presentations on d.o. instead
I see the reasoning behind it both for organising tracks, camps etc. as well as providing recorded sessions as resources.
My first question would be whether it can be done within d.o. Why not adding a tab to the user profile where anybody can add links to presentations they have given?
You could even go further and allow them to be tagged with Drupal versions and projects, and then they could be listed as resources there.
That would be much more flexible then locking everybody and every event into an external system.
My immediate problem for example with joind.in would be that I don't want to register accounts that don't even have a privacy policy.
Site builder and Documentation WG member
For anyone who doesn't know
For anyone who doesn't know me already: I'm Lorna, project lead of joindin. It's an open source project and I'd fully expect some feature requests (and maybe even some patches) to come in to support any Drupal community adoption of the platform. Sounds like we could also use some education on things like privacy policies - this just hasn't come up for us before.
One thing that I think hasn't been made clear so far: joindin is more than a list of your talks and a link to the slides (actually we've got an issue open for adding multiple links so you can link videos, blog posts, whatever). It's about giving feedback to speakers so that they, and conference organisers/track chairs, can improve. So as well as "Person X gave talk Y at event Z" you can also see that they were awesome, their talk was engaging and funny, but that one person felt that they finished too early. This info is gold dust for speakers and organisers alike, and it's the main motivator behind joindin. The fact that we hold and share the community's history of event schedules is kind of an extra bonus, but a good one since plenty of attendees use our mobile apps for easy schedule view at events.
Really interested to see how the comments and questions evolve on this thread, it's making me think in new ways about the joindin project and that's good, whatever happens!!
Maybe open badges, too
If only I had spotted this post at the weekend, Lewis... :-)
Reading through, it strikes me that this might also be answered partly by implementing Mozilla Open Badges on d.o, as I'm proposing at Amsterdam.
It would be epic if joindin implemented open badges. Then we wouldn't even need specific integration - d.o users could cherry pick talks on joindin to publish directly to their d.o profile...
Talks missing?
Lewis, it looks like there's only one talk listed for that event. There's about 90 more that need to be added yet. :-) (And soon enough that presenters can "claim" them before they give it.)