Demuxed 2017: The Best Demuxed Schedule since 2016

Demuxed Conference
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

For those of you that follow Demuxed on Twitter, you may have noticed a cryptic Tweet over the weekend about the goings-on over at Demuxed.com. If you didn’t actually go look, you missed out on being one of the first to see the schedule for 2017!

Where are lightning talks and what is short-form?

Hey look, a short-form session right before a standard-length session.

The absence of lightning talks and addition of short-form sessions were two tough decisions, but we made them for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, we simply had too many good proposals this year not to try and squeeze more of them in. Lightning talks are usually a bit of a mixed bag; some of the talks are incredible, but they’re also the one place that product pitches have snuck in. So, after much deliberation, we decided to forgo lightning talks this year and instead sprinkle 10 minute talks throughout the “normal” sessions.

We’ve dubbed these 10 minute talks “short-form.” We consider them vital to the overall content, with the only difference being that they’re more concise and as such we generally won’t be taking questions. Keeping the talks on schedule this year is going to be a challenge, but we think it’s worth it.

Tickets

Moov Atom (early bird) tickets sold out within a week of being live, and less than a day after we added a button to the website. Tickets are going even faster than they were last year and even though we have more space at the new venue, all signs are pointing to selling out again this year. If you’re interested in coming, we highly suggest buying a ticket sooner rather than later.

Are you a student, FOSS contributor, or simply not in a place where you can afford a ticket? Thanks to our generous sponsors we’re able to offer discounted tickets to anyone that needs them, so please, please, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Everyone that submitted a proposal: THANK YOU!

We had an incredible number of high-quality speaker submissions this year, to the point where we started seeing scaling problems with our approach to speaker selection. The good news is that we have a lot of great ideas for how we can improve things next year, but unfortunately it meant that this year’s selection/announcement process has been slower than we would have liked.

What *is* the selection process?

We take pride in trying to do talk selection right. Three of the four things we talk about as our guiding principles are directly related to the selection process, so we take it very seriously.

  1. We put together a selection committee made up of people from across the industry. Members are chosen because they know video, the video industry and, just as importantly, care about the Demuxed community. We give no preference to sponsors when we choose talks.
  2. We start by redacting any identifying information from the spreadsheet before the committee meets. Redactions include any references to names, companies, projects, or gender when it could help identify the speaker and helps ensure that talk selection is based on merit.
  3. The selection committee votes on the redacted titles/abstracts. During these rounds the primary objective is to simply decide if the topic is interesting to the community, so common reasons for a proposal to get killed at this phase is if the committee feels it’s marketing-centric or “buzz-wordy”.
  4. Once the list is pared down, we provide the remaining talks with fewer redactions to the committee. At this point the committee is trying to pick the talks that will help build a well-rounded schedule, including making tough decisions between similar topics.
  5. Over the last few selection committees we’ve ended up identifying areas that are lacking in the schedule. This is where we may explicitly start reaching out to speakers that may not have submitted so we can ensure important topics are covered.

What will change about selection next year?

The anonymous voting process really didn’t scale very well. However, we think most of the problems there can be solved by simply doing the very first round of anonymous review individually online before the committee meets in person. Evaluating ~40 submissions as a group in one night is much easier than 70+ and helps protect us from too much groupthink. Adding a remote evaluation step would allow committee members to take their time looking through each submission the first time before giving a private thumbs up/down.

We can’t wait to see you all in October!

It feels like its still ages away, but it’s actually right around the corner! Again, if you’re interested in coming, we expect the tickets to sell out early this year, so don’t procrastinate too much. Make sure to let your friends know; we’d love to meet them too. 🎉

💖 Matt McClure and the Demuxed Squad

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Demuxed Conference

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The conference and community for developers working with video.

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