The final step in selecting talks for IndiaFOSS 2024 was mock presentations from the potential speakers. On a tangential note, we invited the community to sit in on the mock presentations and provide feedback to the potential speakers. It was a last-minute decision but given the response we received, we will be actively seek a larger reviewer pool, who can also sit in on the mock presentations for IndiaFOSS 2025. I attended almost all of the mock presentations to provide feedback to the speakers and to enable @ansh to take the final call on the proposal. During the mock presentations, I noticed that the review comments I made were different from the comments that others were providing so I am writing down notes to hopefully enable potential speakers to craft better presentations and to also provide heuristics to future reviewers.
My comments below are heavily inspired by good PR review practices (and good PR creation practices). See How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human (Part One) · mtlynch.io and How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human (Part Two) · mtlynch.io. See also How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You · mtlynch.io.
Fundamentals
- Is the talk appropriate at a National conference? IndiaFOSS is a once-an-year National conference where people from the FOSS United and the broader FOSS community come together. The IndiaFOSS program committee therefore needs to ensure that the talk is appropriate at a National conference. It is difficult to define what is “appropriate” at IndiaFOSS but it is easy to define what is not appropriate - talks by non-practitioners and introductory talks on FOSS projects by speakers who don’t have significant experience with the FOSS project
- Is the talk appropriate for the IndiaFOSS audience? The IndiaFOSS audience will usually be split 50-50 between students and professionals. Even among the professionals, the ratio leans heavily towards young-career professionals with a small % (10-20%) of the audience being senior professionals, including those who contribute directly to FOSS projects
- Is the talk meant for the community or for enterprises? All things being equal, talks for the community are prioritized over talks for enterprises. This is because there are sufficient other avenues (e.g. national conferences, meetups) of knowledge sharing by enterprises for enterprises whereas very few exist by the community for the community
Talk “architecture”
- Is the talk the right way to present the underlying concepts? There are a lot of ways to convey the same underlying concepts. The “right” way to present the underlying concepts is context-specific and, like before, it is easier to see the “wrong” ways
- Is the talk accessible to a majority of the audience? Accessibility here refers to whether prior knowledge about the topic/problem is necessary to be able to make sense of the talk. As much as possible, we want everyone to walk away from the talk with something new e.g. beginners should know new concepts and experienced professionals could walk away with a new library or a new way of solving a relevant problem
- Does the talk provide actionable insights to a significant % of the audience? Making the talk accessible to the majority of the audience doesn’t mean that no one walks away with actionable insights. Some talks are meant for beginners and some talks are meant for professionals. We should prevent talks from becoming too generic, thereby preventing them from providing actionable insights to anyone
Talk “flow”
- Is the presentation text-heavy and can visuals better convey the information?
- Does the talk follow the “reverse bollywood format” i.e. put their main conclusion upfront? At any point in time, a lot is happening at the IndiaFOSS conference. The audience could be engaging with sponsors, interact with Project Showcase and Community booths, attend workshops, join Birds of a Feather sessions, listen to talk, or just network with the community. Audience are welcome to leave talks as and when they see fit. The talk does not have a monopoly on audience attention and as such, you need to hook the attention of the audience, and starting the talk with the main conclusion is one way to do so
@ansh do you remember any other “category” of comments that aren’t included in the above?