To be clear, in full agreement with need for track chairs. That will help with the review aspect for sure. 

But there's also the proposal side that needs improvement. Without incorporating a few key changes, no matter the efficacy of the reviewers and track chairs if they don't have enough evidence to review on, it will still be a lot about gut feeling, who-you-know, renown and biases involved. These will always exist, we're humans after all, but an aim of the program committee should be to minimize these or at least to be able to reasonably defend why proposal A and not proposal B or C was selected.

Best,

Ruben 

On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 9:57 AM Geri Jennings <geri.jennings@...> wrote:

I like the track idea, and I would propose a track specifically for developers working for vendors building tools in the cloud-native ecosystem and their particular concerns around developing stable, secure, and reliable products in this environment.

I've been to many conferences as an end-user, and I totally understand why improving that attendee experience is a focal point for many. It will also go a long way toward helping us all understand how people are actually using our tools in practice and obviously will also be hugely beneficial to the end-user community as they discover best practices for deploying apps to the cloud. But there are some unique considerations that come with building tools that integrate with or extend Kubernetes, for example - and I would love to continue to have the ability to network with others facing similar problems and to learn from their experience at this event.

A theme that emerged from this last KubeCon was that Kubernetes needs to become "boring" - which to me was a way of saying that Kubernetes and its related tools need to focus on delivering a stellar experience to end-users. If we do this, the end users will come. But it would still be nice to talk to each other about the pitfalls we face along the way, and how we've overcome them. That's one of my favorite parts of this community.

Geri Jennings
CyberArk