Topic Proposal Selection Process

For anyone who is curious about exactly how topics were chosen, here’s a clarification of the criteria used in the decision making process:

We selected twelve proposals in four rounds of three. Each time we made a selection the topic selected was BOTH the highest ranked proposal not already selected AND a proposal with at least half of the maximum number of evaluations at that time.

In the first two rounds we also skipped over a few proposals which had opted to be Discussions rather than Presentations, but then realized that we did not have a good programming option for Discussions and did not want to penalize these more interactive proposals, so we included these in subsequent rounds. The net result was that in the end we did succeed in selecting all of the highest raked proposals, with the exception of a few posted very late in the process, (on Friday night or Saturday) which thus had too few evaluations to have standing.

It should be noted that we frequently saw projects jump to the top of the rankings early on, but fail to maintain that position with larger numbers of evaluations over time, while conversely those projects which did gain enough evaluations to be granted standing always maintained their positions over time. Thus, the projects which were actually selected did all remain in a contiguous block at the top of the list at the end of the process, though the exact ranking of these various proposals with respect to each other did not necessarily remain constant in the final ranking list.

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