Speakers’ selection: the process and the numbers

Previously, when we closed the call for speakers, we shared some information about the selection process. Now we want to take the opportunity to follow up on that process and to share some applications’ statistics and the selection process that led to the schedule we now have presented.

Applications statistics

A total of 93 speakers applied with 149 session topics, which means that many speakers submitted multiple session topics (we allowed the submission of up to three session topics per speaker).

Below, you can see a so-called pivot table with all speakers categorized by gender and origin. Two of the submissions were submitted with 2 speakers, one male and one female speaker in the same session:

Some statistics stand out:

• The clear majority of the speakers were from outside the Nordics (74,73%)
• The clear majority of male-only speakers in total (71,43%)
• Only three female speakers from Nordic
• The Nordic speakers were primarily from Finland and Norway with one speaker application from Denmark and Sweden and none from Iceland (this is not visible in the pivot tables).

The pivot table below shows all the submitted sessions organized by category:

Selection process

The selection process started immediately after we received the applications . Here is an overview of the process that we went through:

High-level process

• Speaker application closes
  • Export all applications to a Google Sheet only shared with speaker group members
• Manual screening of applications
  • Filter out duplicates, spam, unsuitable speakers, and talk topics
  • Categorize applications by speaker origin, speaker gender, and topic category
• Voting process
  • Anonymize topic descriptions, so they don’t include information that reveals any speaker or company information
  • Distribute to each WC Nordic team member their own Google Sheet with only topic titles and anonymized descriptions to add their votes to each application
  • Summarize all votes and calculate an average for each topic application
• Selection process
  • Sort all applications by voting average and start selecting the talks
  • Adjust the selection based on the following high-level goals
    • The majority of talks should be from Nordic speakers
    • Balanced gender distribution
    • Strive for representation from all Nordic countries
    • Representation from all topic categories and different skill levels
• Schedule process
  • Create overall slot-based schedule
  • Group the lightning talks suitable for a similar audience
  • Place sessions in tracks
    • Try not to have similar talks on both tracks at the same time
    • Excepted popular talks in the larger room
    • Good if the audience wants to switch rooms often, people moving around is good for the dynamic
  • Get feedback from WC Nordic group members
  • Announce externally

Selection results

In the end, we decided on the schedule that you hopefully have seen by now. If we take the previous pivot tables  including only the accepted talks, we have the following:

Not visible in the pivot, but worth mentioning, is that the applications from Danish and Swedish speakers got selected, which means all Nordic countries are represented except Iceland.

To summarize

To sum up, the process was tricky, but we are confident that we ended up with a great schedule and did our best to find a right balance with the high-level goals that we applied to the selection.

Any feedback on these statistics or on the selection process is very much appreciated, and hopefully, we can build on this knowledge for future WordCamp Nordic events.