Clojurians Log v2

anyone here that has submitted a talk to a Cognitect clojure conf in the past?

as we’re working on getting Clojure/west responses out today, something that has always bugged me is that we are not able to give additional feedback to speakers about why their proposal is not accepted. this is primarily because it would require a lot of time to do so. I’m trying to figure out a way to do this that is helpful while reducing the effort on our side to make it feasible.

some cases are easy

- a talk was not accepted due to either the number of talks we could accept or balance considerations, but a future resubmission would be welcome

- a talk was not accepted because the topic is not applicable to the conference and would be unlikely to be accepted for future confs

- a talk was not accepted because the submission needed improvement (and maybe some pointers on why)

those seem like useful things to know as a submitter (I’d be happy to have this feedback when being rejected from a conf)

other cases are more complicated. for instance, what if the topic is in scope, but reviewers don’t think it’s a good idea? in most cases like this, probably resubmitting even with improvements is not going to be successful.

I guess my question to the greater y’all is - would some feedback in the form of knowing which bucket a proposal was in be helpful?

Absolutely. I haven’t submitted a talk before, but plan to eventually and having any additional feedback would be helpful.

If the case is dialling up the feedback from “no” to “no for this vague reason”, that’s an improvement.

I’m worried that moving from “no” to “no, not interested in this talk” would be worse

but maybe I’m just over-thinking it

I think that concern is understandable, but I think I’d rather have that knowledge as a submitter and look for other venues for my talk or other topics rather than assuming that it was in one of the other buckets and continuing to pursue the idea.

thanks

Or even worse, having a good idea and feeling that it was uninteresting and dropping it.

yeah, I worry about that. there are always more talks that I think are good than there are slots.

@alexmiller I think it would be a good idea. It’s tricky to do, but feedback is nice. Speaking of feedback, something I have always wanted to mention but have always forgotten to mention is that it would be nice to have speaker feedback after our talks.

I find by far the most useful feedback is when an attendee steps up to the stage after a talk and talks to the speaker directly. 90+% of the attendee feedback I’ve seen is either not useful or in a few cases actually really upset the speaker and soured their experience of the conf.

Hmm… well, that’s a fair point. However, it is nice to get critical feedback, though.

the vast majority of comments are along the lines of “good talk"