Feedback for speaker submissions

[andreasscherbaum]

Currently speakers do not receive any feedback as to why their submission was rejected. Occasionally a speaker sends an email and asks for such feedback, but that it rare. Overall there is no feedback for the speaker how they can improve in order to potentially get their talk accepted.

In addition, the Call for Papers committee has no way to store their own feedback about a talk, short of writing down notes in the text,

This problem can be solved by giving each talk voter a couple of options per talk. As example (list tbd):

• "Talk Description unclear"
• "Speaker profile incomplete"
• "Talk description too short"
• "Talk is not targeting the conference audience"
• "Too many talk submissions"
• ...

During the talk voting process, this allows faster talk voting, as there is less need to write a text note about a talk.

During the talk selection process, the sum of each buttons can be shown as additional hint why a talk should be selected, or rejected. This helps with the decision making process.

For the speaker, this feedback can be shown (anonymous) on their talk overview page, and gives the speaker valuable feedback how to improve the submission for the next conference.

[markwort]

How about a simple tag system, where every feedback is a tag?
A tag system could also be used to keep track of:

• talks that have already been at other conferences
• talks that have a common topic (e.g. JSON, or text indexing)

If it's just a tag system then one doesn't need to come up with (and maintain) a list of feedback options, which could change from conference to conference.

Here are some more feedback ideas:

• too many submissions for topic
• too many submissions for language
• too complex
• too abstract
• too long
• tries to cover too many aspects

Keeping track of "Too many talk submissions" is probably not worth-while, as this is always a problem.
Adding a simple message "Your talk has been rejected, please consider that there have been X more suggestions for Y many slots, so we cannot accomodate all submissions, regardless of their quality-" in case no other specific feedback was recorded, would fulfil the same need.