Akademy/Handbook/Program committee

Goal and Scope

We want an interesting, inspiring and useful program for Akademy. The program committee is tasked with putting the program together.

The program committee is tasked with:

Writing and publishing the Call for Participation
Defining/adjusting the evaluation criteria for tasks
Evaluating and selecting talk submissions according to the chosen criteria
Creating the conference programme
Communicating with all potential speakers about talk acceptance/rejection and to confirm speaker availability once they are accepted

The program committee is not involved in the selection of the keynote(s).

Required participants

5 people for the program committee
1 program committee facilitator to move the process along and support the committee in putting together the schedule

Suggested Timeline (2024)

Announce Call for Participation: 6 months before Akademy (April)
Deadline for Submissions: 5 months before Akademy (May)
Deadline for Choosing lineup: 4 months before Akademy (June)
Announce Lineup: 3 Months before Akademy (July)

Talks Evaluation Criteria (2024)

Relevance to KDE

Is this talk related to KDE work or something more generic/external?

Interest to KDE

On internal projects, weigh "importance" to KDE, e.g. rating a talk regarding porting Frameworks to Qt6 higher than a random plasma widget.
If an external topic is in question, is this something that our community would be interested in?

Speaker

Are they known? Do they have interesting insights to share? Can they give a good talk?
(To the best of our ability) Does our potential lineup reflect the diversity of the KDE community?

Topic

If we have submissions on similar topics, there's an option to suggest a merge of talks (and we can ask submitters to work together on one or do a panel)
If there are many submissions on the same topic, try to solicit talks on different topics or focus (i.e. if there's a lot of technical talks, solicit some related to organizing/planning/achievements).

Technical information / Using Indico

Talk submissions are reviewed on our Indico instance https://conf.kde.org/
If you (as a reviewer) suspect there are some submissions missing, ask a person with Indico admin access to look for talks with no assigned track.
Indico roles:
- Reviewer:
  - reviews the abstracts based on the chosen criteria
- Convener / judge:
  - Accepts, rejects or merges submissions based on the reviews.
  - During this step, the submitter is given additional feedback in form of a comment (e.g. time slot, merge information)
Indico notifications:
- Email templates for Accept/Reject/Merge decisions need to be set up in order to have email notifications (Call for Abstracts > Submission > Notifications)
  - It is good practice to test notifications beforehand. Conveners should be aware about which text is included in the templates, so that there is no confusion about what to put into the comment.
  - It is possible for submitters to reply to the acceptance/rejection notification from within indico, so no need to request confirmation via email. Just make sure that people know what is expected of them.
General usage information about indico can be found at https://getindico.io/