Re: Call for Speakers / Presenters

Joshua D. Drake writes:

> Master of Ceremonies is a new position that was created by the core (at
> least Josh Berkus)
> for dealing with speakers.
>
> There are others, such as Editor-n-chief which is myself, and I am in
> charge of soliciting writers
> and working with publishers.

I find these titles confusing, comical, and presumptuous. There are no
"ceremonies"; PostgreSQL is not a circus. And since Jillian is not
actually going to (most of) the events she coordinates, she's not the
"master", which would be the person that runs the event. As to yourself,
are you actually editing anything, and are you the chief of a group of
people? Are you actually filling the role of an editor-in-chief at, say,
a newspaper, that is, are you the one that gets to approve what is
published and do you take the responsibility for it? I'm not sure. Next
time I talk to my publisher, do I have to check with you first? Call
yourselves "Coordinator of Events" and "Coordinator of Publishing" or
something along these lines, and people will know what you actually do,
and they will see that your tasks are analogous.

I find it peculiar and disconcerting that the advocacy group appears to
organize itself by assigning all available tasks to individual people.
Whatever happened to the well-established and successful method of
providing a mailing list as the point of contact and solving tasks as a
group? You will notice that there is no "Coordinator of Development",
"Doc-Writer-in-Chief", "Master of the Makefiles", or even a single
webmaster, notwithstanding the fact that there are de-facto experts in
these fields. The method you are choosing might be a good way to get
things done now and quickly, but it's not scalable.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net