VMworld Public Voting
In an attempt to get better sessions picked out at VMworld, the part of the selection process is now done via public voting.
http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/
This has been an interesting process watching Twitter and a variety of blogs discuss various sessions and which ones are good and which ones folks want to go see. As one would expect the immediate result is that there is a lot of sales pitching going on.
“Vote for my session”. “Vote for me”. “My company’s session needs some love to get to VMworld”.
Overall this has been fairly harmless in my mind. The immediate gut feel is the sessions are going to be popularity contests. Those folks that are the most popular are going to get sessions. That must be bad. That can’t be right.. good sessions aren’t only folks that are popular. True to an extent. Once one starts thinking about popularity and why individuals are popular, my reasoning says this is actually a good thing. The question to be asked is “Why are those folks popular?” Any of a multitude of reasons means that session is likely going to be a good one.
- The individual is a good speaker and is a lot of fun
- The individual has good things to say
- The individual knows many people
At the end of the day isn’t the goal to have a good session whatever the reason this presenter is popular?
on 17 May 2010 at 10:56 pm
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Ian,
Good post. I agree with a lot of what you had to say. It’s somewhat of a catch-22 situation. Many of the sessions I voted for are people I know or people whom I know of. Why do I know or know of these people? Mainly because they are people who are interested in and knowledgeable in the same areas that I am interested in.
On the other hand, I am already following them on Twitter and or reading their blogs so I am exposed to their knowledge and opinions already. It would be good to hear from some other people and their perspectives.
It’s a tough choice; more from a known and respected presenter or take a chance on the unknown person with what may be a different perspective and who has the potential to become a new addition to the list of valued resources.
What makes it harder is that to really go through the list of sessions and look at them closely takes a long time. For me and many of us in IT, free time is not something we have in abundance.
In the end I looked through the list for topics that interested me the most (also tough with so many great choices) and when in doubt I tended to go with the known person.
It would be interesting if they did this without listing who the presenter is. Obviously there would still be plenty of people marketing their own session, but it would me much less of a popularity contest.
Rod
on 19 May 2010 at 2:01 am
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[...] promotion over and done with. A little bit about voting strategy, many people have already stated this, but the fact remains, this voting is becoming a popularity contest, this is not how it should [...]