Pentabarf

Talk team information

Pentabarf has a complete interface to rating talks, available at https://penta.debconf.org/penta/report/review . On each talks page from there, ratings can be set at the "rating" tab. Speakers are hyperlinked to the respective person pages, and from there you can see all past talks they have given. This provides a bit of information to help in making your decision about a talk.

Talks are rated in three categories Each category has five levels, -100, -50, 0, 50, 100. Larger numbers are better.

• Relevance - There can be great talks, but some are not appropriate for the main track at DebConf. The Relevance category is a measure of this.
• Actuality - speaker seems to know the topic and (as far as i know) is capable of presenting it
• Acceptance - How well will attendees like this talk and desire to attend?

Scoring calculations

We compute a talk's score in each category by taking the average (arithmetic mean) of all ratings of the talk in that category. A talk's total score is equal to (2*acceptance + actuality + relevance)/4. (so acceptance counts twice as much as the other categories).

If no one has rated a talk in a given category (e.g. if everyone has left "actuality" unrated), that category's contribution to the total score is 0.

Acceptance process

The general procedure we have used in past years is

• A team of raters representative of Debian is formed, with proper "review" access to Pentabarf
• Raters use the URL above to rate as many talks as they can. They rate based on the three categories above
• There is a talks team meeting on IRC.
  • Talks are sorted by total rating (the average of the three numbers)
  • Some cutoff is selected above which all talks are accepted. (Perhaps not all have to be, this is just done to save time)
  • Talks below this cutoff are briefly discussed (like 60 seconds). A decision is made to accept or not.
• Talk status are updated in pentabarf to "accepted" for accepted talks, and something else for the not accepted talks
• Speakers are told that being "not accepted" does not mean that they can't speak, just that

Talk state and progress

Talks have a variety of states that they can be in:

• State: Undecided, Accepted, Rejected,
• Progress: New, Review, Candidate, Withdrawn, Rejection-candidate.

Talks start off in "Undecided, new". Upon acceptance, they are put into state "Accepted, Candidate". What do the other states mean? We need to come up with the state that means "We haven't accepted you, but you can still give the talk at DebConf if you schedule it later when rooms are free." - "Rejected" sends kind of the wrong signal here.

Suggestions for improving the UI

<azeem> hrm, actually, it would be nice if "Rating" and "Other Ratings" were on different tabs
<azeem> and a "next Event" button
<azeem> it would be nice to have an rating overview page, to see where we don't agree and where we can look closer
<azeem> what I would /really/ like for next year is CSV export/import and a PDF with all talks and their descriptions, so I can rate stuff offline in the beergarden
<azeem> the review overview should be color-coded by talk type, i.e. it is not obvious which events are talks and which are BoFs
<dkg> would be good to have a way to flag proposals as "pending followup"

• ratings report shows blue if you have rated, tan otherwise; might be nice to have a legend, and to indicate partial ratings (e.g. if you have left a category blank)
• it would be really useful for talks selection and scheduling to have some kind of free-form tagging of proposals.

DC10 Penta issues TODO list

collected here since many do not have access to view rt which makes it not very useful

• disabilities setting/unsetting weirdness
• expose amount_paid in admin ui
• fix currency display from EUR -> USD
• things to disable at various dates: DebConf10/ReconfirmationProcess
  • expansion of dates (maybe easier to just disable date changes)
  • disable selection of on campus rooms (Deadline: july 6th)
  • food choices
• once events are scheduled revert views/schedule/event.rxml:35 change
• 08:45 < pabs> hmm, the images on the individual talk pages point at the wrong files https://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/542.en.html

Admin information

Pentabarf is used as the new conference software for debconf7. The upstream wiki provides some generic installation instructions. Debian and Debconf specific instruction are below. Run as root:

apt-get install postgresql-8.1 rails libxmpp4r-ruby libopenssl-ruby librmagick-ruby

As the postgres user:

createuser -P -S -D debconf
createdb -O debconf -E UNICODE debconf
createlang plpgsql debconf

As an unprivileged user:

svn co https://penta.debconf.org/svn/penta/trunk debconf
cd debconf
psql -U debconf -h localhost debconf
...
\cd sql
\i tables.sql
\i tables_logging.sql
\i views-localization.sql
\i views.sql
\i trigger.sql
\i activate_trigger.sql
\i types.sql
\i functions.sql
\cd data
\i import.sql
\cd ..
\i pentabarf-user.sql
\i debconf.sql
\q

Change into the pentabarf directory, copy config/database.yml.template to config/database.yml and config/mail.yml.template to config/mail.yml, edit both .yml files, and run:

ln -s /usr/share/rails vendor/
script/server

Disabling SSL in script/server before starting it is recommended at least for the first tests. Open the browser at http(s)://localhost:2342 and login with pentabarf/pentabarf.