So, out of interest, what proportion of proposals got a “No” from the first 4 questions (i.e. none of the advisors knew the person nor had heard them speak yet)?

I’m not sure I can talk about specific numbers, but I was shocked at how large a percentage of submitted proposals had someone on the advisory board with an idea of the person’s speaking ability. The fact that most of my fellow advisors have been speaking at conferences for twice as long as me gives them a much broader range of experience than I had personally. (That I missed the last two GDCs because of Pirates didn’t help.)

I don’t think the attendee choice program had the effect they wanted last year. I ended up in there and got my talk approved by begging people who know me to go vote for me. It’s hard work to evaluate that many proposals, so I understand the appeal of leaving the rating to users, but I don’t think the “vote on the website” approach really gets them what they want.

Part of what it comes down to is – should your lecture line-up be decided by an advisory board who are working in the industry, by the organizers, or both, and if so, how do you negotiate both? It’s an interesting quandary, actually.

Part of it is politics, too. I’ve been none-too-kind to CMP in the past; I’ve flat out said on my blog that the GDC isn’t worth going to. So, I’m not too surprised when they don’t invite me along to talk at their conference. Luckily I know press people and advisers that get me in for free if I want to go.

The big question you have to ask, too, is who the conference’s audience is The GDC is theoretically for game developers, but my observation is that it’s more for newbies wanting to break into the industry. The conference is pitched as a way to mingle with game developers, and most “break into the industry” advice includes attending GDC. In this case, I figure that they get more traction out of having people with big names give talks in popular areas instead of some relative unknown telling people what they really do need to know (but don’t want to hear). The old hands like us still go along to network and socialize and complain about the lame sessions (while often getting the large company to buy a badge). A session with a deep topic is likely to scare off the newbies, but unlikely to really dig deep enough into a topic to be worthwhile for the rest of us.

Ultimately, no, I don’t think you’re too harsh. But, in many cases I don’t think we’re the target audience for the conference. This is one of the reasons why I like the smaller conferences like the IMGDC (http://www.imgdc.com/) instead of the huge ones, and the focus is on providing good info for experienced developers. I’ll have to give ION a try next year.

And … what do you do when all you’re left with is the last question (does it look interesting) ?

Given how few people speak out of the number of people in the industry, my guess is that the majority of fresh blood in the speaking circuits comes in like this. An advisory board *of sufficient size* has a good chance of at least knowing the speaker themself, and for something focussed and small like ION I imagine (just guessing?) that you can cover a lot of the “unknown quantity” speakers this way…but how does GDC manage that? They have a TINY advisory board / selection panel by comparison (IIRC total of 20 or so selectors, reading a total of 2,000 or so proposals)?

So, what CAN you do if none of you know the person?

I have high hopes that someone has great ideas for this. e.g. I think the “audience choice” track at AGDC last year was a truly awesome idea (allow the conference attendees to pick 5 talks that were rejected by the selection panel and have them put back on the conference schedule).

Personally, I used these criteria:

Did I have any personal experience with this speaker’s previous lectures or writing?
Did one of the other advisors have that experience?
Do I know anyone who used to work with the guy, or at least see him speak?
Does this proposal look like it will just be a sales pitch for some piece of middleware?
Did the proposal itself look interesting?

Any of these could be positive or negative. Getting bad talks out of there was pretty important to me, and I used my previous experience with a speaker to reject at least one talk.

I’m an advisor for ION again this year, mostly because I know I can do a better job this year than I did last. We’ll see if I feel the same way after one more year. There will be some natural turnover on the board this year, though, so it won’t be 100% the same people.