I finally read Mark Levison’s thoughtful weblog entry about his experiences reviewing and selecting session proposals for Agile 2009. He makes a number of suggestions, which I reproduce here:
- Authors need to know that proposals are being reviewed/commented and that replies/updates are a critical part of the acceptance process.
- Authors need to be notified when a comment/review is added.
- People who write comments/reviews need to know when replies are made
- RSS is not the the only notification system some of use still prefer email.
- The difference between comments and reviews needs to be made more clear.
- “Browse session proposals” page needs to display the length of the sessions. It makes it easier to make decisions if we know their length.
- Proposal database should exportable to spreadsheet. A web page is handy but once the hard work begins it would be alot easier if I could just work in Excel or even Google Docs.
- I don’t want recommendations visible to the proposal author. These are often friends and colleagues who I want to work with again. This maybe true today but I can’t tell.
Whether you agree with all Mark’s suggestions, I think that unless a number of us volunteer to own some feature requests, nothing will change for Agile 2010. I volunteer to own the feature requests related to notifying submitters about comments and reviews. I will send Jim Newkirk, the Agile 2010 chair, an email asking him how I can make myself a customer of the submission system.
Which feature request do you volunteer to own?
