Program Committee Membership

The conference will benefit from as diverse a program committee as possible. Members should be recruited from major projects to ensure that they are represented.

Reviewer Instructions

Instructions for authors (and reviewers) can be found in the proposal submission instructions and in the FAQ.

Reviewers must join the pycon-pc mailing list, which is for program committee discussions.

As a reviewer proposals will be assigned to you randomly, as proposals are submitted. You will recieve an automated e-mail notification when this happens. This random assignment ensures that each proposal is assigned to at least three reviewers. You may choose to "opt-out" of any proposal assigned to you before you vote, and another reviewer will be assigned in your place. You are also encouraged to vote or comment on other proposals, even those not assigned to you. All communication with authors should be done via the comments.

If you see a proposal that you think could be good, but it's lacking in some way and there is not enough material for you to judge, please ask the author to flesh out their proposal, via comments. Be specific about which parts of their proposal are lacking. Suggest additions they could make that would improve the proposal.

Proposals will be assessed using the "Identify the Champion" process. Reviewers vote using a +1/+0/-0/-1 scale:

• +1: Good proposal. I will champion it at the PC meeting.

  The reviewer is strongly in favor of the proposal, and is willing to argue for the proposal during the accept/decline period (November 24 to 30). To be accepted, a proposal must have at least one +1 vote (i.e. the proposal must have a champion).

  A +1 vote means that the reviewer is willing to put their reputation on the line in favor of the proposal. So if you're not sure about a proposal, don't champion it.

• +0: OK proposal, but I will not champion it.

• -0: Weak proposal, though I will not fight strongly against it.

  +0 & -0 register opinions without affecting the voting, except in marginal cases.

• -1: Serious problems. I will argue to reject this proposal.

Program Committee Review

Once all the proposals have received votes from three different reviewers, we'll schedule an IRC meeting to make the final selections. Not all the committee members show up for this meeting, though all members are certainly welcome to participate.

All votes should be reviewed before the meeting. Many votes will have been made before authors made edits to their proposals, and some votes may need to be updated by the reviewers.

Proposals that have at least one +1 vote and no -1 votes are provisionally accepted, and proposals with only -1 and -0 votes are almost invariably rejected. Most of the discussion is spent looking at proposals with a mix of positive and negative votes, or proposals without a +1/champion vote.

Decisions are provisional at this point only because among the accepted proposals we might find essentially the same proposal submitted three times by different people, and we might be forced to reject one or two in the service of diversity.

Finally we come to the meat of the process: proposals with counterbalancing +1/-1 votes or that have several +0 without champion. Generally speaking, all such proposals should be considered biased against accepting, and if the proposals provisionally accepted fill the schedule, these gray area proposals should only be mined for critical diversity needs.

For background, please see the "Identify the Champion" paper.

High-Profile Talks

Independently of the program committee review described above, any "high profile" talks should be identified and may be accepted by the Conference Chair or the Program Committee Chair (with recommendations from reviewers). "State of the project"-type talks for major projects and implementations should be identified and may be treated specially.

Voting Statistics Page

On the voting statistics page ("voting" link), proposals are broken down into categories:

1. Needs champion

   Proposals which need a champion are those with no +1 or -1 votes. +0 & -0 are weak votes, and not enough for a good decision.

2. Needs votes

   Each proposal requires a minimum of 3 votes before an accept/decline decision can be made.

3. All votes positive

   Proposals which have at least 3 votes that are all postitive. These are usually accepted without discussion.

4. All votes negative

   Proposals which have at least 3 votes that are all negative. These are usually declined. Proposals that are not beyond hope may be worked on with the authors (via comments) to make them better.

5. Mixed votes

   Proposals with a mixture of positive and negative votes (at least 3 total). These proposals are on the fence. Reviewers should work with authors before the final accept/decline phase to get these propsals all positive. Many will remain mixed, and the champions will help make the final accept/decline decision.

Related Pages

• The "Proposal Votes" page ("Voting" link on the left) is the main overview page for the Program Committee (RSS feed).
• The "My Proposals" page provides the main overview for proposals which a person is associated with (RSS feed). If you have submitted a proposal, are a co-author, are assigned as a reviewer, or have commented on a proposal, those proposals will be listed here.