How Session Selection Works

Once you’ve submitted a stellar session proposal, you'll probably wonder what the process for session selection looks like from the other side. We are happy to pull back the veil on this community-led selection process for you to better understand the bells and whistles of session selection. So what happens after you press ‘submit'?

Here's some background: the DrupalCon Program Team is made up of a Global Chair and a Local Chair for each track. These people lead the content curation, selection, and management for their track through the life of the Con. Global Chairs have held this role before at a previous Con and hold a mentoring type of role. Local Chairs are recommended by the community, are normally located in the local time zone where the Con is taking place, and it is their responsibility to take the lead on content programming for their track. You can check out the Program Team for DrupalCon Barcelona here.

Before the Con site goes live to accept submissions, each Track Team creates a track description and suggests topics that would be a good fit for their track. This helps session submitters understand what kind of content they are looking for so they know which track would be the best fit for their submission.

Upon the close of the call for papers, each track team reads through each and every submission that was received in their track. That’s right-- they read every word you write! During this time, the teams make notations about various different things – for example, they'll note whether session has been presented at a camp or meetup before, whether the speaker has stage experience, if the topic is relevant for the content they are looking to provide, and whether this is something that the community would benefit from hearing. Some tracks get so many submissions that they have to create different subcategories so they are comparing apples to apples.

Once every proposal has been read, the teams then score each session, and that is where the tips about how to get your session selected come in handy. The advice we've shared all matches directly to criteria our track teams evaluate each session with.

If a conflict of interest arises, a neutral 3rd party global track chair is brought in temporarily to help read and rank the sessions in that track.

Once scored, the Track Teams each put their ideal line-up together and present it to the entire group. In these meetings, the group works together to make sure that the same content isn’t being presented in various tracks, that speakers aren’t spread too thin with too many talks, and that we are presenting valuable and pertinent sessions for the community.

During this entire process, the Drupal Association does not participate in ranking or scoring of sessions. It is only after the Track Team has made their selections that the Association steps in to send off notification emails.  

Hopefully, you've got a clearer idea now of what goes on ‘behind the curtain.' We have a more detailed version of this information that will permanently live here on the site, and will ideally dispel any confusion about the process in the future.