Claire Giordano: About Talk Selection for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024

As promised in the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, all of the talk selection decisions were emailed out on April 17th. Our talk selection work has now concluded, with the possible exception of accepting proposals from the Reserve list. So what’s next? First I want to thank all of you Postgres people who submitted such amazing talk proposals into the CFP for POSETTE, now in its 3rd year. I was so impressed by the submissions and wish we could have accepted more of them. And I also want to thank Alicja Kucharczyk, Daniel Gustafsson, and Melanie Plageman from POSETTE’s Talk Selection Team for contributing their time and expertise to collaborate with me to select the talks for this year’s virtual POSETTE event. It’s not easy to carefully read through and review 184 talk proposals—in just 8 days—to come up with the program for an event like #PosetteConf. That’s right, 184 talk proposals—from 120 unique speakers. (The CFP had a maximum of 4 submissions per speaker.) With just 38 talks to accept this year, that means POSETTE 2024 has a ~20% talk acceptance rate. Bottom line, we had some difficult decisions to make. So many great talk proposals we had to lengthen the POSETTE schedule to make space The original POSETTE plan for 2024 was to have 4 livestreams with 9 talks each. The math looked like this: Each livestream would have: 1 invited keynote—not selected through the CFP talk selection process, but rather an invited keynote speaker 8 unique talks selected via the CFP process Hence, 36 talks total: 32 talks selected via the CFP process + 4 unique keynotes However, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that, we had to throw that math out the window. There were too many good talk proposals. Luckily the talk production team led by Teresa Giacomini was able to rejigger their recording schedules to make room for 6 more talks. So the final POSETTE 2024 schedule will have: 42 talks total: 38 [...]