How does the voting work for Developer Day Scotland

Developer Day Scotland is a BY the community FOR the community conference based on the Developer Developer Developer! community conference. We accept sessions from the community on any aspect of software development. When the call for speakers closes we go in to a voting phase. At the end of the voting phase we tally the votes and work out which speakers we need to contact to ask to speak, and which we need to contact to say sorry.

I’ve been asked by a few questions how we will be going about our voting process.

When the voting closes all the sessions will be ranked from most popular to least popular. The simplest thing to do at this point would be just to pick the top sessions. However, we want to ensure that a broad range of subjects are covered and that we get a diverse set of speakers.

If an individual speaker gets more than one session into the top set of sessions we will ask the speaker to hold the second session in reserve in order to give another speaker a shot at speaking. This may sounds like a strange thing to do, but we want to avoid “The Joe Bloggs Show” from emerging because a particular speaker has submitted a large number of sessions that are all quite popular. Also, if we have one speaker taking too many session slots we run the risk of having a big hole in our schedule if they were to be ill or have some other emergency on the day which prevented them from speaking. By the time the process is complete we would be looking at getting as close to as many separate speakers as there are session slots – one for each available session slot.

However, if two sessions that are broadly similar make it into the top list then the duplicates will be removed. We will try to be as fair as possible with this. If one of the speakers has another session that made it into the top list then their duplicate will be removed to give a chance to a speaker that may not have the opportunity to otherwise present.

Naturally, some speakers will have just missed the cut and others will have sessions dropped because of some kind of duplication. These speakers will be asked to come along anyway with their session up their sleeve just in case one of the other speakers has to drop out at the last moment.

At the end of the day we are aiming to get as much community involvement as possible. The process is part science in that the voting shows what people want to see and part jiggery-pokery in that we have to schedule all this into a day that works.

We have almost 30 speakers who have submitted sessions with over 50 session proposals in total. Inevitably there will be some disappointment for the speakers who didn’t get picked and we are very sorry that we have to reject any of the speakers as we have so many excellent sessions.

In the meantime the session voting is open, so vote for what you want to see.