Heya: 

As a non-attendee, I absolutely have a stake in the outcomes of the conference - that's why I care about how the choices are made and hope that they're made on the basis of actual interest, not as (say) a shrewd marketing ploy. (I'll also state that my personal opinion as a non-attendee is that the attendees footing a large part of the bill (hey, thanks sponsors!) should play the deciding role in the proposals, and that I therefore do not plan to vote.) 

I have some sympathy for the "if they get accounts, they might stay" sentiment, but it seems unlikely, and there's a very real downside to maintaining the status quo in that high-quality proposals that play fairly might get left out of the mix.

>>> "Michael B. Klein" <[log in to unmask]> 11/30/2011 8:25 PM >>>
IIRC, we've gone around on this before. It's been argued (possibly by me,
but definitely by others) that those *not* attending the con have a stake
in the outcomes, too, what with the streaming and the archiving and whatnot.

I agree that blatant electioneering is a problem -- every year, there are a
bunch of people who sign up for accounts just to vote for a particular
presentation. My hope has always been that since those people care enough
to go that far, they might take a minute to read through the rest of them
and realize that there might be more to this than just the proposal they
came to shill for. Some of them might stick around and/or get involved.
Maybe.

In any case, I'm interested to see how effective this current "call for
support" is.

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hey folks:
>
> I'm not going to be attending code4lib yet again in 2012 (alas), so treat
> this with a grain of salt, but I wanted to point out that at least one
> project is encouraging their community to sign up for code4lib accounts and
> vote for their project's proposals.
>
> This seems rather gauche to me, and if left unchecked in future
> conferences, likely to lead to election-style pandering & the likelihood
> that we'll miss out on higher-quality proposals that don't have an army of
> ballot stuffers to whip into a frenzy or who are too honourable to engage
> in such behaviour. That would be an unfortunate future for the conference,
> in my opinion.
>
> It's too late to do anything about it this year, but a thought for next
> year: maybe voting gets limited to those who register for the conference so
> that voters have some skin in the game (that is, their precious time and
> travel expenses). Proposals could be made before registration, but voting
> would occur after registration (with attendance slots held for speakers,
> naturally).
>
> Dan Scott
>