ScalaMatsuri blog

This blog is about ScalaMatsuri preparation, and sponsored by Hatena, Inc.

Session voting begins!

Hi. This is @eed3si9n, one of many ScalaMatsuri organizers.

Summary

tl; dr. Here are the gist of this post.

  • The voting will be conducted by ticket holders, sponsors, and staff. It will close at Monday, December 25st, 23:59 JST.
  • The voting results will be interpreted more like a public opinion poll. In that, instead of picking the speakers purely based on the number of votes, ScalaMatsuri selection committee will pick up the mix of popular sessions, sessions with the most buzz on social networks, as well as hand-picked sessions.
  • The voting UI will be available directly from the ScalaMatsuri website after logging in.

A regional tech conference that's also global

ScalaMatsuri 2018 will continue to uphold the two major goals in a sustainable way:

  • Providing a space for Japanese Scala community to socialize, and present ideas to the international audience.
  • Make a global technical conference with the universal access, where people from various background such as languages, gender, or ethnicity, can be comfortable.

The concrete actions taken for these goals are documented in my last year’s post A regional tech conference that's also global, but here are the hightlights:

  • Establishing Code of Conduct, and making an intro video for it.
  • Public CFP, travel grant, and translations of the submitted session abstracts.
  • Public voting of the sessions.
  • Subtitles on the slide decks and professional two-way interpretation.

My thoughts on how these went are written up in ScalaMatsuri as a lifestyle.

Uncategorized voting

To research “what the audience wants to see on the day of the conference,” ScalaMatsuri 2018 will adopt uncategorized voting. In other words, we will remove the categorization of English/Japanese 90/40/15 minutes, and you can pick whatever you want to see from all the proposals. One of the reasons we are even able to consider this, is because we have successfully implemented two-way interpretation. We no longer have to be nervous about the language barrier issue.

Public opinion poll

One point I want to clarify before we begin the voting this year, is that this year’s voting will be considered a public opinion poll.

In 2016 we observed that when hundreds of people try to select 22 sessions, the selected talks end up forming a cluster of similar topics. This is actually an obvious outcome because the voters did not talk to each other to coordinate “hey, let’s pick that talk for intro to fp.”

Instead of picking talks from the top mathematically, we think the conference would be far more enjoyable if we treated the voting more like a public opinion poll to infer topics and trends. ScalaMatsuri selection committee will pick up the mix of popular sessions, popular topics, as well as hand-picked sessions with some degree of subjectiveness.

SNS impact

As an additional data point to measure popularity and the trend, we will take SNS impact into the account. The SNS impact will be calculated by quantifying the buzz (or share) on Twitter, Facebook, Hatena Bookmark etc to measure the excitement about the session.

We are planning to tally the number of times a session was shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Hatena Bookmark via the social buttons placed on each proposal page of the official ScalaMatsuri website.

Voting program

We will continue with the voting program made by Tech to Value. After logging in, you can now vote from the ScalaMatsuri website’s session proposal list.

f:id:mocolog:20161125123612p:plain

You can vote by clicking on the ☆ icon. Since there are many sessions, you can first pin some of the candidates first using the pushpin icon.

How to vote

Participants who bought a ticket, sponsor companies and ScalaMatsuri staffs are eligible for voting. This article covers how participants can vote.

1.) Confirm your e-mail address that you used to buy the ticket, and the reception number in the e-mail you have received from DoorKeeper.

f:id:oe_uia:20181209220413p:plain
Doorkeeper reception number

The email you have received from Doorkeeper contains the QR code with your reception number (your 6 digits number below the QR code). You will be asked to enter the reception number when you sign in. We will verify this code later to match up with your Google, Twitter, or Github account that you use to sign in.

If you haven't made the purchase yet, there are some tickets available from the following page: https://scalaconfjp.doorkeeper.jp/events/66684

2.) From the top right of the proposal list page, press the “Sign-in” button and sign in using your Google, Twitter, or GitHub account. (This will pop up an Authorize application dialog)

When you sign in, please enter the DoorKeeper reception number. This is it for the preparation.

Select the sessions you would like to see. The number of votes per person is limited to 10. The remaining votes will be displayed at the top of the proposal list page.

There are toggles to display only the voted and/or pinned sessions. f:id:mocolog:20161125125159p:plain

The voting will close on December 25th 23:59 JST. Any votes afterwards will be invalid, so please be sure to vote early.

3.) Get psyched waiting for the voting result!

Voting FAQ

Q.How will the voting result be announced?

A.We will announce the result at the ScalaMatsuri website.

We will also announce on the Twitter, so this might a good chance to start following us.

  1. Is there any extra chance to talk what if my proposal is not accepted?

You can propose your talk for our Unconference, which will be held on the third day of the conference (March 18, 2017). The talks are proposed and assigned on the day of the Unconference in the morning. We tend to have more sessions during the Unconference, so please bring your talks.

Please remember to vote!