Voting for Talks
Posted November 11, 2008We recently integrated some software from The Social Collective to power the BIL Community. These new additions on our site allow you to connect with other BIL attendees and submit or vote on proposals for talks at BIL2009. Additionally, it allows you to discuss the conference (or whatever) using its own messaging mechanism that’s also mashed up with Twitter.
Just after launching the site, we received this great question:
John Larkin (thatlarkin): If the conference is self-organizing, why are you asking for speakers ahead of time?
First off, we should make it clear that anyone will be able to show up and give a talk the day of the conference. That being said, we learned some things from the last BIL Conference that we feel need fixing. (Refer to my blog for more information.)
At BIL2008, the talk schedule was done with a whiteboard and anyone could sign up for a time slot to give a talk. Within a few minutes, all the space for both days was already taken — if you hadn’t been there at the very start, you didn’t get to put your name on the list.
BIL 2009 will have much more space and we’re expecting many more people. We’re hoping people will submit their possible talks beforehand so they can spend some time preparing for their talk, as well as sharing with others the range of talks that will be at BIL. If our main room fills up (which holds about 1500 people), we would like to look towards the submitted topics to see which were most popular (through pageviews, comments and ‘favs’), and give them preference for the largest areas.
We will also have many smaller rooms that hold a little over 100 people each and these will feature the whiteboard signup like we did last year.
BIL is organized by the community. Does the community think there’s a better way to do this? I’ve voiced my opinions, now it’s time to hear yours. If you have any ideas as to how we can ensure the talks with the most interest make it to the biggest rooms, please share them in the comments.
