You’re a reviewer on a session that I proposed. I can see your review, though if you have a separate field for an accept/reject recommendation, I can’t see that. (And btw, I posted a comment answering a question you had in your review.)

However, I want to note that even if I *could* see a big old “REJECT” recommendation, it would be OK. Honest.

I am grateful to you for serving on the conference committee. It’s a hard, thankless, time-consuming job. I know; I served on the committee for 2 years.

I understand that this is an excruciatingly difficult decision process and that there are far more good submissions than there are slots. And I understand that your recommendation is not about whether or not you like me, or whether you want to work with me again. This is a decision about which sessions have the greatest probability of serving the audience for the conference. Ultimately, that’s about serving the customers: the conference delegates.

Greater transparency gives me more feedback from which to learn for next time.

So I hope the conference review system allows for even more transparency in coming years. I might not like the news, but I’d rather know.

Dave Nicollete and I are thinking of running an informal session at the end of Agile 2009 where a few reviewers could give some guidance to people submitting next year. Interested in joining the informal panel?

I have a number of suggestions, too, but I fear that if the stage producers and submitters don’t jointly take the reins here, then nothing will change. We know how much energy one needs to produce a stage and review submissions. It exhausts us. If we truly want to change things, then we must start now.

I like Chris and Dave’s idea about providing guidance to submitters. I think we should also guide them in demanding feedback! I think that would provide a great first step. I think the submitters and reviewers both need to act as customers for the submission system. I volunteer to own a feature request. Who else does?

I agree with one or two others who have commented that authors need to see any recommendations that are made. The recommendations are the way we improve our proposals. If recommendations are secret, then submitters have no basis to improve their submissions. We’re just tossing darts in the general direction of the dart-board while blind-folded. I don’t think this has anything to do with noses getting out of joint. After all, we /want/ our sessions to be interesting and valuable.

Think about the way sessions are evaluated for the XP Days Benelux conference. FWIW I think it’s the best-organized agile event on the calendar; the organizers actually apply agile thinking to the task of organizing the conference. It’s the only event I know of that uses a truly open review process, although there are several others that solicit feedback from “anyone” rather than just official reviewers. Submitters and other interested parties openly help improve all the submissions. This not only makes individual session proposals better, but also enables people to eliminate duplicate content, combine proposals, and refine the content of sessions so that there is a coherent flow to the whole event, and so that presenters can be sure they are addressing particular areas of interest to participants. Participants can experience a certain level of continuity and consistency throughout a day’s worth of sessions presented by different people – sessions that weren’t originally conceived as part of a continuum of related content. The result tends to be much better than could be achieved if each submitter worked in isolation and only a few people made decisions about acceptance.

If we talk about all this in Chicago, with Chris and that other Dave guy whose surname is spelled almost the same as mine, maybe we can include one or more of the people involved with that event to see if they might have some ideas we can use for Agile 2010.

Cheers,
Dave