How We Select Talks for the Open edX Conference

The Call For Proposals for conference talks for the 2025 Open edX Conference is now live! Submit your talk proposals now – the submission deadline is December 4, 2024.

Once the talk proposals are all gathered, how do we select the talks for the conference? Great question! We go through a review process using the Sessionize interface in a format called “Comparison Evaluation”, described here. Based on the Elo rating system,  this method has evaluators rank different sets of three sessions, and Sessionize calculates the highest-rated options based off of the evaluator’s ratings.

The evaluators are chosen from the pool of speakers from the previous conference – if you spoke at the 2024 conference, be on the lookout for an invitation to be an evaluator for your track for the 2025 conference! We also add in a selection of reviewers from Axim and working groups; for example, some members of the Marketing working group participate in the selection process for the “Case Studies” track. The criteria that evaluators follow can be found here: Instructions for Open edX con 2025 talk evaluation.

Once evaluation is finished, members of the conference committee take a look at the results of the evaluation and the final talk selection is made. Generally, the top rated talks are selected; however, there are occasions when a top-rated talk may not be selected. This could be when two top-rated talks cover the same topic (we have, in the past, asked these speakers to consider collaborating on a talk), or the same speaker is selected for multiple talks (in which case, for diversity of viewpoint, we may select a lower-rated talk to bring in more voices).

Finally, the selected talks are laid out in their talk tracks. We try to ensure that talks with a potentially similar audience don’t overlap (for example, a product talk and a developing talk that cover a similar area of the platform).

Please submit your talk proposal today, and we’ll see you at the 2025 Open edX Conference!