Feedback & testing wanted - please help!

Can I ask for some help, please?

Some testing? Some feedback? Please

Here is where I need the help: http://mimas-aotb.appspot.com/ - now let me explain…

Agile on the Beach 2017 is in July next year so the whole organization schedule has to move up two months: we’ll be opening the call for papers towards the end of November or start of December.

But I have a problem.

Last year we had close to 250 submissions from over 100 potential speakers. We have six committee members voting in two rounds on the submissions. And I try to give as much feedback to those who submit as I can - this year it took nearly six hours to give feedback to everyone who wanted it.

As a result I have a lot of work in the background.

After 2015 I thought: we need some tool to support us. But when I looked none of the submission review systems I found really fitted our needs. For 2016 I’d left it to late so we had to do the same as 2015 but it got me thinking…

Add to this, we’d like to involve more reviewers to spread the load and get better reviews, the current system would make too much work for me, i.e. its not scalabe.

In the summer I started writing my own system: Mimas - named after on of Saturn’s moon.

Here it is: http://mimas-aotb.appspot.com/

Its on Google App Engine and you’ll need to log in with a Google account.

I’d like to invite you all to play with it and let me know what you think. And especially let me know if find something that doesn’t work.

A Dummy AOTB 2017 conference is set up but you can create your own conferences which you and everyone else can see them too. There are some permission controls in place but any conference with the word “Dummy” in the titles will relax permissions so you can try it with as a speaker or reviewer.

Note: each conference has state, there are some things you can only do in some states, e.g. conferences start closed and then need to be opened for submissions. No reviews can occur until submissions are closed and round 1 starts, and of course, round 2 cannot start until round 1 is complete.

Please send me any feedback, all is very much appreciated: allan@allankelly.net.

One more thing: In writing this I kept telling myself “This is only for AOTB, do what AOTB needs, nothing more.”

Inevitably, now it is nearly finished I do wonder “Umm, could others find this useful?”

If you think you might find this system useful, or just if you have an opinion on whether you or others would find this useful please mail me and let me know. I’m interested to hear anything and everything.

Were I to make this more widely used the first thing to change would be the track listing, they would need to be configurable, I’d also need to revise the voting methods, at the moment it is set up for the Agile On The Beach procedure, and and and, …. please mail me if you think of something.