DataBS Conference updates!

Know what the problem of asking the data community for fun talks is? That you get 36 talk submissions and all but maybe a handful are REALLY GOOD. How good you ask? 21 out of the 36 submissions, 58%, had at least one rater (out of a total of 5 raters) give the highest "I like this talk and would really like to see it" rating.

And even for an event that will stretch from 10AM to almost 5PM, I can only squeeze in 14 talks.

So tonight, as I write this, I'm going through the spreadsheet and I'm picking out the talks that have the highest aggregate ratings and putting those as acceptances. I'll be writing out emails for those during the day.

But it's really sad to see a bunch of really promising talks not make the cut simply for time reasons. So I also have to make a secondary decision to invite a selection of talks to submit pre-recorded videos that we can upload before the event. We did 5 minute lightning talks for Normconf and it was very fun. I probably won't be limiting things to 5 minutes since recordings are "free" in a sense, but same idea. That decision might take another day or two to finalize and then I'll send those emails out. Then I'll finally send out all the sad rejection emails.

Oh, yes! The attendee signup form has been put together! I'll more broadly announce it on Tuesday's newsletter, but paid subscribers can grab theirs a whole... 5 days early. Also note that it's a "pay what you want" system to help defray the expected costs of a webinar license for up to 3000 attendees. $0 is a perfectly acceptable number to put into the form.

Also I'm including a mini data snafu story related to the conference planning at the end for your entertainment.