Background: I was in academia/research for 12y+, submitted hundreds of
papers, reviewed even more and was serving on many dozens of PC,
organizing workshops, serving as general chair and program chair,
yadayada … yawn …

The number one thing I liked about industry conferences, especially
after I moved from research to industry (struggling to get my PhD and
master student’s papers accepted) was that: 1. industry conferences
focus on sharing knowledge, lessons learned while academia focuses on
where you made a mistake (or: I’ve done that same research 20 years
ago, where’s the improvement), and 2. the lack of structural and
formal review processes.

Let me be very clear on this: blind, double blind, triple blind, feel
free to do whatever you *think* makes sense. The only thing I’m rather
certain would help if we’d get rid of the compartementalization, that
is, rather than reviewing my little corner at KubeCon (serverless,
machine learning, what have you), let *all* reviewers access *all*
submissions. This model works very well for O’Reilly (where I’ve been
reviewing for Strata and Velocity for years) and gives you way more
objective results, since it cancels out the bias across the reviews
and the reviewers.


Cheers,
Dr. Michael Hausenblas
(sorry, couldn’t resist ;)

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Michael Hausenblas, Developer Advocate
OpenShift by Red Hat
Mobile: +353 86 0215164 | Twitter: @mhausenblas
http://openshift.com | http://mhausenblas.info