This document contains guidelines for PostgreSQL Europe Conference CfP/Talk Selection Committees.
The CfP/talk selection committee (hereafter refered to as "The Committee") is responsible for curating a balanced, interesting and informative program of talks that will be appreciated by the conference's target audience.
A balanced program will comprise of:
The conference organisers will appoint a chairperson for the committee. This person (hereafter referred to as "The Chair") will be responsible for the day to day running of the committee, and for the administrative tasks relating to talk selection and creation of the program. The Chair may or may not have a full voting role on the committee.
The Chair and/or the conference organisers will select the remaining members of the talk selection committee.
In order to get a balanced review of the submissions and in order to get a range of views, it is important to select a committee with a variety of backgrounds, interests, roles, experience levels etc.
It can be useful to launch an informal "call for participants" for the talk selection committee.
The committee must follow the rules set out in the Guidelines for Community Conference Recognition which states in particular that the talk selection committee MUST NOT consist of 50% or more members from a single company or group of companies under the same ultimate ownership or management.
The committee can choose whichever method of communication works best for them.
A method that has been found to work well is a group chat in Telegram or a similar service for day-to-day discussions, combined with voice or video calls during the selection phase. This is just a suggestion; you may choose any method that suits the group.
The Chair should ensure that the committee is aware of the important milestones and deadlines. In particular:
It is essential to ensure that there are sufficient submissions, including sufficient diversity of talks and speakers, to be able to select a balanced program.
The CfP must therefore be published widely, especially within groups of people who feel under-represented in the PostgreSQL community. Experience has shown that it will be necessary to do considerable outreach work, encouraging people who are hesitant, but who are interested and who have something to offer the event, to submit talks.
This is the responsibility of the entire organisation team, but The Chair has an important role to play. This work must start before the CfP closes.
The Chair must ensure that all members of the committee have access to the talk voting system, and must share the link to the system with the committee before the end of the voting process.
Voting can start on or before the CfP deadline. Voting will be at https://www.postgresql.eu/events/admin/conference-short-name/talkvote/
Once the individual voting has taken place, the committee will decide collectively, usually during a (virtual) meeting, which talks to select or reject.
Committee members must be made aware of information such as:
To assist the selection process, the submissions will usually be sorted by average rating and talks will (generally) be selected from amongst the highest rated submissions.
Note that the ratings are to be used as a guide only - the committee should choose the talks they think will give the best overall program for the event.
The process can take place in different ways, but a common way is to select a cut-off point and create a shortlist of submissions that scored over this cut-off point.
The shortlisted talks will be discussed by the committee, who will decide which to accept/reject/accept as a reserve talk.
Be sure to keep in mind the desire for a balanced program (as discussed above) when selecting talks:
Talks that are definitely wanted may be accepted at this point without waiting for the deadline for informing speakers.
Talks that are definitely not wanted can be rejected at this point without waiting for the deadline for informing speakers.
The sooner acceptance emails are sent to selected speakers, the better.
If a selected speaker is no longer able to present their talk, the committee must choose and accept another talk to take its place.
A number of talks should be selected to go on a reserve list.
A reserve talk may or may not be moved onto the schedule to replace a talk that a confirmed speaker is no longer able to present. This could happen at any time between the schedule being published and the day(s) of the conference itself.
It is important to choose sufficient reserve talks to allow you to keep the balanced nature of the schedule that you have created. This means selecting reserve talks from a variety of speakers and on a range of topics.
You want to keep the number of talks per speaker to 1 or 2 as far as possible, even when speakers have to withdraw. This means that you want to have some speakers on the reserve list who do not already have confirmed talks on the schedule.
Unfortunately, however, reserve speakers can not always get travel authorisation unless their talk is actually on the schedule. This means that it is important to know whether or not a reserve speaker plans to actually be at the conference and whether or not their talk will be prepared and ready to go at the last minute.
To allow for last-minute replacements (just before and/or during the actual conference), it is useful to include some talks from confirmed speakers who you know will definitely be at the event, even though this may mean that a speaker ends up giving more than 1 or 2 talks. It is still important to confirm whether or not their reserve talk will be prepared and ready to present at the last minute.
Once the talks have been selected and the speakers have confirmed that they can present their talks, the schedule itself can be created.
Use the scheduling tool in the system to create a schedule.
This involves:
Consider things such as:
Note that this is not exhaustive, and is just presented as an idea of the type of information that should be readily available to the committee for a given event.