How the JSDayES 2020 talks have been chosen!

The organization team of the JSDayEs is almost new this year.

The team is formed by 6 people, being four of them new in this edition (and the other two, coming from previous ones).

5 of us are developers, with JavaScript background and several years of experience.

We've received 105 talks, of which:

• Only 16% were sent by women; 67% of the talks were sent by men and the 17% didn't inform about the gender.
• Topics were very different: architecture, frameworks, testing, VanillaJS, inspirationals, machine learning, accessibility, discussion table, IoT, infographic, animations, CSS...
• 34% of the speakers are known in the community and 68% of them are partially known or totally unknown.
• For the 50% of the speakers it will be their first experience as speaker in the JSDayES.

As our goal was to have very different kind of talks for this 2020 edition, we used different criteria to select them.

We used 5 types voting criteria:

• By author: who is the person that sent the talk? Is he/she known in the community?
• By experience: does he/she have enough professional experience?
• By topic: what is the talk about?
• By diversity.
• Random: Own criteria of the member of the organization team.

In each column, we could vote 31 points at maximum, assigned to 5 talks with 3 points, 5 talks with 2 points and 6 talks with 1 point.

Only the random voting criteria gave us the liberty to vote on our own. The rest of the criterias forced us to distribute votes depending on known speakers, unknown speakers, with experience, without experience, between men and women, etc.

When we finished the votation, we chose the 4 most voted talks of each column and also those with the maximum number of total votes according to 5 voting criterias.

There were 21 talks because in case of a tie, we had to put all those with the same score.

We made a filter: talks with the same speaker, same topic, etc removing the talk with the lowest number of votes.

After all, we have 16 talks: 14 of them will be part of the schedule and 2 as backup. Only one speaker was also speaker in the past edition. Depending on received confirmations, we may need to use discarded talks.

The result of using this voting criteria is:

• 50% of the talks will be given by women and 50% of the talks will be given by men, although there will be a discussion table formed by women that will increase the women percentage.
• There are two talks given by couples: one man - man and the other man - woman (UPDATE: the talk with two speakers man - woman will be finally only man because she won't be able to attend).
• There will be 1 talk about accessibility, 2 about testing, 2 about Progressive Web Apps, 2 inspirational talks, 2 about Web Components, 1 about APIs, 1 about FullStack, 1 about Frameworks, 1 about Tooling, 1 about Machine Learning, 1 about VanillaJS and 1 discussion table.
• 8 of the speakers are well known in JavaScript community and 8 partially known or totally unknown.
• 3 of the speakers never have been before in a conference like this, as speaker.

And from the organization we are aware of:

• We have discarded talks about IoT, CSS related with JavaScript, animations... sorry we only have a few slots.
• We have discarded talks sent by great developers, known and unknown.
• Despite having 4 men's talks for every woman's talk, it is necessary for the sector that 50% of these are women's.
• We can't choose all the talks.
• There is no 100% fair voting criteria nor valid and liked for all the people.

We are convinced that with the diversity of gender and topics, and the opportunity for new speakers, a good event will come out, but it will be the attendees who will judge if we made a good selection.