Team:Content

From SHA2017
Revision as of 12:11, 28 January 2017 by Martian (talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search
Content
1st line contacts: Claudia, Yeti, Martian
Does: Curates the programme, from managing the CfP to setting up the schedule.
Does not: This team will not do anything infodesk, speaker desk, speaker lounge, media lounge, media desk related.
Is an exclusive team: No
Contact: content@lists.sha2017.org
IRC: #sha2017-content
Deadlines:
  • 2016/08/01 - Call for Participation
Needed resources:
Comment: We're a complete team now. Other teams dealing with speaker-support during SHA still need a lot of help. If you want to be lead-content for your village contact us and we'll give you acces to the content-planning application.
Vacancies: 0
Current team size / amount of ppl: 0
Contact at projectleiding: User:Damlie
Backup Contact at projectleiding: User:Attilla
Managed Vacancies:
You can add for your team on a page by adding: {{TeamVacancies|Content}}

8 Team Members Content

About

Team:Content will coordinate the conference content.

The team coordinate the lecture program, and also somewhat coordinate* things outside of the lecture-halls; like workshops, village activities, etcetera. With the help of villages and other groups, we will attempt to provide a more cohesive visitor experience, content-wise; with some overlap between the stuff going on at the campgrounds and the stuff in the lecture halls.

* Coordination in this context doesn't mean deciding what is good content and what is not. Nor does it involve a high committee telling other people what to do. It rather means to entice villagers and other volunteers to join the bigger picture, and try to (partially) merge their content with the program, or prepare their own content in an accessible way. This may of course involve us pushing, harassing and stalking you from time to time

Description

Members

Communications

If you wish to contact Team:Content, please send an e-mail to content@lists.sha2017.org.

Content process

So a rough outline of the process as we understand it from past editions (which doesn't make it set in concrete, improvements can and should be possible).

TL;DR version: if you can't be arsed to read this longish description then you have forfeited your right to moan and whine about it at any later stage, so just bloody read it, will you?

- Every potential speaker, including big names, have to have a proposal in Frab. That doesn't mean that every speaker has to put it in themselves, only that there must be one (and with the consent of the speaker(s) involved, obviously)

Examples from OHM: the rather famous Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg had his literary agent put in a proposal for a storytelling workshop. Which we gratefully accepted after finally convincing ourselves that we weren't being trolled. Which we weren't.

For OHM, one of the Team:Content members "adopted" several high-profile whistle-blowers and had proposals put in Frab on their behalf.

The idea here is very hacker-like: if you feel a speaker *should* be there and none in Team:Content wants to "adopt" that speaker, then you must do it yourself or convince someone else to perform that task. If neither you, nor anyone else cares enough to make a simple proposal in Frab happen, then it probably is not such a terrific idea to begin with.

Right now members of Team:Content are pestering their favourites for a speaker slot to make proposals and things have been picking up lately. That said, we still would like to see a lot more proposals than we have received so far and even if the current uptick in proposals holds steady we may have to go for a "soft" extension of the CfP-deadline. Meaning that we will start processing proposals while still allowing for later proposals to go through the approval process.

What does the approval process look like?

- Every proposal gets voted on in Frab by every member of Team:Content. Frab allows for "stars" per proposal. - Proposals that get high marks (four to five stars) clearly have the nearly unanimous "wow-factor" and are the ones that get confirmed first and are probably a good fit for the biggest stage. Since this voting process is more or less anonymous (well, not really, but for most intents and purposes it is), it also prevents the programme from becoming someone's line-up of favourite speakers.

- At this point we will try to work with Team:Communications to start communicating publicly about these cherries on the cake. Because those are likely to attract ticket sales. In the CfP we have said we would be doing that from May 1st onwards. I don't think anyone is against starting to do so earlier.

- The rest of the proposals get discussed in several meetings. We are aiming for quality over quantity and rather have a sparse programme with lots of long breaks but high-quality talks than a crammed programme. It is an open-air hacker festival after all and there should be plenty of other things happening in villages to have a good time. Either way, the discussions about edge cases will be settled in person and will not necessarily be by consensus but just by majority voting.

- That said, the experience with OHM was that there was quite a bit of last-minute rushing to the (extended) CfP-deadline with more speakers than we actually could accomodate. At OHM there was ultimately a lot of last-minute arranging space at villages. That is something we want to replicate to the extent that this time around we will not be accepting such proposals, but would like to hand them over to villages that *want* to have their own stages. Unless a village specifically wants to hand over stage slots to the official SHA programming (which we still may not want since the OHM experience was that the AV-teams then felt obliged to arrange for streaming etc), we want to encourgage villages to develop their own village programmes and want to give their curators access to Frab for that purpose.


- For every proposal that gets accepted, a member of Team:Content now *must* adopt that proposal, chase the speaker for confirmation and be the PoC for that speaker. This may include activities for visa-processing, travel and lodging arrangements etc. for those speakers that simply cannot be expected to arrange that themselves.

- Covering traveling and lodging expenses is ultimately a bit of an arbitrary decision. It is more a less a function of how much we want that speaker and what can be expected from a speaker her- or himself. If someone is a starving ethical hacker from, say, Moldova or Peru, we're much more likely to consider that person worth supporting than in the case of an employee of a Silicon Valley behemoth. In some cases there will have been preliminary discussions about that already along the lines of "if your proposal gets accepted and it is as good as you have shown elsewhere so you get to be the opening/closing speaker of one of the days, we may be able to contribute to your traveling and lodging arrangements". Thanks to several people in Team:Finance and Team:Projektleiding we have secured a modest budget through a government subsidy that is earmarked for this purpose. If anyone else wants to chip in for this purpose, please have them talk to Team:Finance first, but in principle that is welcome.

- Once we have done all the confirmations/rejections/passing on to villages, there will be a few weekends of planning sessions. With lots of post-its on the wall of an undisclosed location. Which should result in a programme. And therefore a pretext for all of us to have an awesome time. We hope.

Let the bikeshedding commence. Valid concerns, constructive criticism and requests for clarification are even more welcome.

TODO