Session Selection prep

In my opinion, the best experience I had with session selection was when we designated a sub-committee to work on it (2016 - http://2016.tcdrupal.org/). If such a committee existed, I would be willing to play a major role (and/or chair).

The most stressful experiences I've had planning Drupal camp was at session selection night, without any criteria or plan for how sessions would be selected.

The process that we used that year was:

1) Subcommittee met to select a theme, discuss keynotes, and set selection criteria for sessions.
2) Subcommittee reported back to full committee and accepted feedback
3) Subcommittee had authority to recruit and pre-approve "featured" speakers
4) Subcommittee was responsible for recruiting and organizing trainings and summits (we did a higher ed summit that year).
4) After session deadline, subcommittee met and created a draft schedule of sessions.
5) Subcommittee brought draft schedule to full committee meeting for discussion, editing, and approval

I've also found session selection to be particularly stressful at times. I like having a framework in place for making decisions. And support the idea of doing prep/planning in advance as much as possible. I think trying to do it all at once, and all in person is challenging.

I also like the idea of being able to sort of pre-approve either certain people or topics when we know they'll be a draw. And think that doing so can help make other things like a beginner track better too. When we can solicit people to present on specific topics, and at the same time approve their submission rather than asking them to submit but then saying we're not sure if we'll pick it or not.

I'd be glad to help out with this effort, too.

Most years this has tended to be a fairly laid back process, and I'm OK with that. However, I'm all for adding some more structure.

On a related note, I was on the programming committee for a conference that took place in January and that experience had me thinking about this topic a bit. The conference was more geared to academics, but what I liked was how they had a fairly large program committee and each person only was responsible for reading a few submissions (some of which were 10-page academic papers). They used a tool called https://easychair.org. For TCDC, I was thinking it might make sense to have only 2-4 people review each submission (rather than every member of the committee member read every submission), rate them based on a framework (which would be 1-3 basic questions), and then have a sub-committee make the final recommendations. So, for example, we would assign just 6-8 proposals about front-end development to three people/reviewers who are front-end developers. The main benefit would be that not everyone has to review all submissions, which can take a lot of time.

This feels more complicated to describe in writing than I expected, but I wanted to just throw out the idea and express my interest in helping.

+1 for pre-approved sessions. Getting "featured speakers" or the like on the site early would be great, and helping out-of-town folks plan their travel earlier would be nice too.

I'm all for adding more structure to this as well. I think we've gotten better at it over the years and I don't mind our current format but figuring out how to have a better way than "Joe read all the sessions and can tell us about them in person" or "Let me go read that" would be great. Something along the lines of what Matt is suggesting.

I'd like to help work on Programming/Sessions.

Another +1 for pre-approved sessions. Having some known quantities in place early would be very good for publicity and recruitment of more.

Consensus on last call that we should NOT have a small group of people put together a draft schedule and then have the full committee discuss, make changes, and approve the full schedule.

Rather, some people on the committee felt pretty strongly that we should involve everyone in the entire process.

If anyone has ideas about how to put structure around that and make it work, please let us know.

Personally, that process has not worked well for me in the past and I've been pretty clear about that. I plan to pay a pretty passive role in the actual selection of sessions, because the lack of structure is too stressful.