We’re often asked how speakers are chosen, and as the volunteer speaker lead for this year, I wanted to explain. We use a blind selection process because we want a fair system which allows us to select talks without any bias. This process means that the people voting on talks, don’t know the speaker details.
Submissions
In terms of the setup for speaker submissions, we used a Google Form to handle these. The notifications were sent to my personal email address rather than the event email address. The submissions were also sent to a google sheet which collected all the information for the speakers.
We had 49 talks submitted this year from 33 speakers.
Voting
I collated the information of talk titles and descriptions in to our voting spreadsheet and each organiser was asked to vote for up to 14 talks (the number of sessions we have).
We then had a clear selection of 11 talks which had the most votes, but we had one speaker with two talks in the shortlist. I then removed the lowest scoring talk from that speaker.
We then needed another 4 talks so I created a shortlist from the next highest scoring talks and asked the organisers to vote again. This created another shortlist, which we used to fill out the rest of the schedule.