Rejected Again

I just heard from the 6th International Free Software Forum. They turned down my proposal for a talk.

The answer was rather interesting though. It seems you can go online and see how they rated your proposal. I had three people rate my project.

The first thing they do is rate themselves on the subject that you are proposing. Reviewers #1 and #3 rated themselves "not experts, but comfortable with subject". They both rated my project 4 of 5 in relavence. I am a little puzzled by this score. Not sure why my free software would not be 100% relavent to a free software conference, but anyway. One rated my proposal a 5 and one a 4 (out of 5) for technical quality. They also check you out by poking around on the web and one rated me a 5 and one rated me a 4 for experience (by that I presume subject matter expert). Lastly both gave my project a weak acceptance (yes, but not strong yes) recommendation.

However one reviewer rated himself an expert on my topic, so presumably he would know better than the others, who are not experts. He gave my proposal a 5 for relavence, a 5 for technical quality, gave me a 5 for expereince, and gave my project a strong acceptance rating. Top marks all the way across.

It makes me feel good that the guy who knew the most about the subject, wanted to see it the most.

There is a bias toward existing (and more accurately famous) projects at these conferences, because they have to sell tickets to them to pay for the hall, etc. So actually I am encouraged that I got as far as I did with this, especially since there was virtually nothing on the web for NewI\O at the time of the submission.

It would have been nice to make a big splash at a conference to debut it, but I can not wait until next year to try again, so I will go back to the original plan and annouce it on various technical mailing lists.

Some might think it strange that I post my rejections on here, but they do not deter me. For some reason my mind tells me, "Don't worry, someday they will wish they had NewI\O on the agenda". This could be confidence or this could possibly be mental illness. My whole motivation to continue is to find out which it is. Heheh. :)