Re: Reading is hard

[Alex McGeorge <alexm () immunityinc com>]

Since everyone is jumping on the bandwagon with this let me add some
additional detail for how this process worked.

Most of the Immunity technical staff got into a room and on the phone
and we read through the submissions. At least one person in the room
would have a reasonable amount of experience or expertise on the
subject, so the question got posed to them "would you watch this talk?"
As we all have a low threshold for boredom, answering yes was a pretty
good endorsement.

The answer was usually "Maybe, but only if the presenter covered XYZ" So
then we just called the presenters and asked if they were going to cover
XYZ. What have they already found? How much time are you going to spend
dwelling on what people already know? Then we'd ask questions about the
subject and generally chat them up about their work.

So the criteria kind of boiled down to something like:
1) Are you covering new information interesting to someone with
experience in that area?
2) Can you talk about this easily and entertainingly, such that I can
resist the siren call of the bar[1] during your talk?

For a talk to be good (at our conference anyway) you have to be able to
keep butts in seats and tell them interesting things they didn't already
know. That's partly speaking ability and partly research ability.

-AlexM

[1] Or remove the speaking ability part and just replace it with the
bar: www.thebarcon.org

On 09/22/2011 05:21 AM, Ken Pfeil wrote:
> Why it has taken 30+ years to get to this point is beyond me. This will, no
> doubt, lead to a much higher caliber conference if it catches on. Kudos, Dave. 
> -----Original Message-----
> On Wed, 21 Sep 2011, Dave Aitel wrote:
>
> : So we have a different methodology for talk acceptance for INFILTRATE
> : than most conferences: We call you with questions.
> : 
> : This can be hard, in the sense that some of the best talks are in
> : subjects without many subject matter experts, but if you submitted a
> : talk, and we have any questions, you'll get a phone call from one or all
> : of us. I just think it's a better way to do things, and frankly, I think
> : you deserve it for submitting a talk.
>
> Excellent.
>
> This should also held weed out presenters who know precisely what is on the
> slides, and nothing more. I think every technical conference should do this.
>
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