The problem with the PASS Summit session submissions process is that people don’t know why they’re rejected.
So say we all.
Speaking at PASS
I say with confidence “so say we all”, because of a massive Twitter conversation this morning on the topic. If you’re not familiar with it, the general process for a speaker wanting to speak at PASS is:
- Think up a great session.
- Write an abstract for the session.
- Present the session several times – at user groups, webinars, SQL Saturdays, to your husband/wife, to your dog, etc.
- Realize that the PASS Summit call for speakers ends, like, tomorrow.
- Spend approximately 17 hours polishing the abstract.
- Submit the abstract.
- Get an email 3 months later – either an acceptance email, or a rejection email with no or little reason for the rejection.
Usually, step 7 is a rejection email. Most of us understand that. After all, this year there are over 600 submissions, and far fewer sessions that can actually happen in a week. Speakers understand supply and demand.
And I think if this were a “normal” conference, most of us would be mostly okay with rejection without reasons. They didn’t want it, it’s a big con, whaddyagonna do?
PASS’ Purpose
But PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server…it’s a community group. The whole point of the organization is to help SQL Server professionals grow in knowledge and career. Part of that growth, for speakers, is becoming better speakers. (We have said many times that you don’t know a thing until you teach it.) Part of becoming better speakers – part of knowing you’re advancing, maybe getting into the big leagues – is speaking at the big annual conference, the PASS Summit.
If you never get to speak there, clearly you’re doing something wrong. A vague abstract, too many typos, too popular a subject to break into. No problem! We’re ambitious, we speakers! We’ll work on that! Get a spell checker! Choose a better topic, or a better angle! Something!
But we don’t know what we’re doing wrong. We don’t know how we’ve failed the selection committee.
Tell Me Why You Broke Up With Me, or I’ll Keep Calling and Texting and IMing and…
The selection committees are volunteers. We get that there’s only so much you can demand of volunteers. “Work through these 120 abstracts, pick the best ones, rate them, formulate a distinct and clear reason for rejection for the others (no less than 150 words!), do my laundry and taxes, pick up the dog from the vet…” Of course you can demand too much of volunteers!
This isn’t too much. Ask the people who are volunteering. Many of them are speakers, too, and also long to have a reason for their rejected sessions. Find a middle ground…instead of “Too many selections submitted for this track” – I’m sorry, but great green jumping DUH there were too many sessions! I hope to god you didn’t reject me while leaving the track underpopulated!!
Ahem, I say, “Too many selections” is a complete non-reason. It’s an insult. “I couldn’t keep dating you because I don’t feel right dating you AND Bob at the same time, Mike!” Terrible, terrible reason. A non reason.
Tell me something useful, even if it’s really short. Examples:
- Your session barely lost out. Try a different spin on this topic.
- Title way too cutesy; tell what the session is about.
- Misspellings galore, man.
- I have no idea what this session is supposed to be about.
- You’ve presented this exact thing at the last 3 Summits; submit something new.
- Microsoft doesn’t even support this software any more.
- Microsoft doesn’t MAKE this software.
You get the idea. Of course people will rant and argue, because people do. That’s the nature of rejection. But give us a reason we can work on, okay?
Commenters! Assemble!
Edit: See the comment below from a PASS program manager. Looks like they’re trying to remedy this. Honestly though, I expect this first pass might be a little bit light / weak.
Happy days,
Jen McCown
www.MidnightDBA.com/Jen
I’ve always wondered if we could give the program reviewers a set of, let’s say, 30 reasons. And let them assign 1-3 of them as a reason a session was not picked. At least we would have that. Heck, I’d want to see the stats on that, too. Two years ago my sessions were rejected as ‘Off-topic’, even though we have sponsors in those areas. It felt worse when I saw that there were other sessions that were orders of magnitude more off topic. I do think that having some outlier topics is good. It’s just that my topics weren’t off topic at all. It made me wonder if the group that got my submissions thought they belonged in a different track. Not sure.
I’ve been on program committees for different types of events, usually large ones. And what *appears* to be missing from the PASS process, as it has been described to me, is the concept of actually PROGRAMMING the event. I’m sure it’s done; it just doesn’t seem to be shared back with the community. What I mean by that is planning out a program of sessions that complement each other. And that don’t have the same person presenting on the same topic every year. Another thing is to have a good mix of session formats. Sure, we have some panels and some regular sessions, but even regular sessions have formats – heavy demo, mostly discussion, theoretical, How-tos versus How-we-did-its, etc. It’s not clear to me how this is done, if at all.
Finally, at most conferences I’ve worked on, the program committee had leeway to suggest presenters do something slightly different. If we had 2-3 great people submit overlapping or similar talks, we suggested that they do a joint presentation. Or if we had a speaker we really wanted but the abstracts didn’t fit in the program well, we suggested other topics for her. Or paired her up with another presenter. If we had 3 great talks from an excellent speaker, we’d suggest that speaker find newer speakers to co-present with to help build the speaker pool. If we had a topic we wanted but no submissions, we asked some people to pitch some abstracts. In other words, we didn’t just rate abstracts and give them a Yes/No answer. It seems to me that the Summit does way too much unit reviewing and not enough system reviewing. It kinda feels like a process techies would come up with, not what event planners would do. We need a bit of both.
Right now the abstract submissions process seems to be just a zero sum game. It could be so much more…for everyone.
I agree about the list of reasons; that’s what I was thinking about, too, to make the process easier.
Interesting about the programming. On the one hand, it seems like it’d be WAY WAY hard. On the other hand….maybe not.
As for suggesting changes, that could be MIGHTY cool. Good comments…
“Off topic” is a funny thing, I think it’s rather subject to the vagaries of fashion.
I suspect, for instance, that “An introduction to Interest Rate Derivative pricing with C++” would be off-topic, but “An introduction to Interest Rate Derivative pricing with R” would be on-topic, even though Microsoft have a C++ product but not an R product!
Well, “off topic” in the sense you’re talking about is, indeed, subject to a great deal of subjectivity. But that’s the thing; any situation where an org is choosing material for a target audience is going to be an imprecise one. We can only take so many polls before people become tired of them, and polls aren’t all that predictive in any case. I really don’t mind PASS making judgment calls, I just want to know a simple reason or two behind those calls.
As part of the abstract review team, one of the big problems is the orator rating tool. In the past you were limited to just ratings and very limited comments. I think this year may be better. I do like the idea potentially combining of abstracts of the same “rating” when there is multiple submissions on the same topic.
I’m glad to hear it might be better this year, though I don’t completely understand your comment about combining.
Jen, agree on wanting to know why, though I’m not sure it will ever satisfy me (or anyone else), but better to try than not. Beyond individual session scoring it would be interesting to see a track and what got picked over what. I might not agree, but it would help everyone to see where choices were made, and maybe even to have some comments from the committee about the theme of each track as they looked at what they had and then tried to cover the bases. Not sure I said that well. Imagine they are all of equal quality, there are still decisions to be made and thats the part I think we all struggle to visualize. Who was I competing with? Why did picking X over Y make it a better track? In the end we’re looking for clues about what to do next time to make the cut and short of ‘run spellchecker’, that’s really hard to give/get.
Agreed: There’s no perfect system, but there’s room for improvement.
I’m starting to feel pretty good about my In-Database Analytics (IDA) abstract rating as highly as “alternate” when I submitted it about six months ago. Since then I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work with Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and I hope, with my next submission, to have a stronger and more compelling story to tell. Fingers crossed.
Good luck.
Nice write up! I’ve submitted my sessions for the first time and I hope to get selected. One of the things about the submissions process is that there is no section for “How much public speaking experience do you have.” I think it would be fantastic to have something like that so that there is a better gauge for speakers. I’ve spoken at PASS Chapters (Local and Virtual) but I’ve done public speaking in other venues for 10+ years in both English and Arabic. It’s hard to break into a speaking role in the summit since there are a lot of well known speakers that speak there every year and are invited to speak at many of the PASS (and non-PASS) events.
I think they should try to go with something like 10-25% new speakers every year to give newbies a chance. Maybe my comments here will increase my chances 🙂
Thanks for your insights I hope to get some good feedback on my submissions whether they are accepted or not.
Jen,
Thanks for sharing the thoughts. I’m one of the program managers for PASS Summit this year, along with Lance Harra; we both work with Amy Lewis & the PASS HQ folks.
We’ve asked all of the volunteers who are reviewing abstracts this year to input useful comments, so that we have something to give back to submitters. This request has been emphasized a couple of times already. One of our primary goals this year is to give much better feedback than has been done in the past. Just thought you’d be interested to know that we’re on it.
Thanks,
Melissa Coates
That’s fantastic! Thanks very much for your comment…I’ll update the blog post with a note.
Pingback: Is the SQL Server Community Too Successful? | Aunt Kathi's SQL Server Home