Following Andrew's comments, here's what I know -- 

1 - User Digest is just one session of about 30 minutes. Liaisons pick the speakers to that. It's supposed to give a review of the thematic subject - GLAM, EDU, etc. 

2 - I'm posting here what I've sent to the Cultural Partners Mailing List -

​"I've just updated the GLAM part on the program liaison page on Meta, putting there everything from our joint google doc. 

Now that the "critical issues" submission part is over, it's high time to submit your suggestions to all the other aspects of our GLAM track, if you haven't done so thus far. This includes suggestions for: 
* Discussions
* Workshops / Training
* Posters
* Lightning talks
Anything else we might have forgotten

Some of you have already contacted me privately about discussions and workshops, so please feel free to update the relevant part on meta. 
Try to keep it in the same format as suggested below, so it's easier to follow - 
* Title:
* Purpose:
* Target audience:
* Length:
* Max number of people (only if there is a limitation on your part):
* Facilitator(s):
* any other detail that will help others get a sense of the workshop and what you want to achieve.
Please see an example I posted on behalf of Barbara Fischer -- building the GLAM KIT library. "

In other words, use the liaison page for now, till the organizing team has the separate pages ready. 
- Follow the format suggest, so it's cohesive and easier to follow. 
- Show your support to proposals, the wiki-way. The organizing team will take that into consideration.
- When the organizing team opens submissions for the remaining parts -- submit! 

Hope that helps, 
Shani. 

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 7:39 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc@uberbox.org> wrote:
On 2016-02-04 3:22 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
Hope Montreal manages something a bit better,

I don't know about "better", nor do I think it quite fair to slam the 2016 team either for what was clearly intended to be an attempt to improve the process - even if some of the results appear suboptimal in retrospect.

FWIW, the Montreal team is keeping a close eye on the experiments being done by the Italian team - no doubt there will be a valuable set of lessons learned and we may be able to translate some of the things that worked well into improvements to future Wikimanias.

As for the programme selection, we are gunning for a process that splits about 30% invited, 40% community CFP, and 30% unconference-style, with the selection process for the CFP being very close to past years (i.e.: public review on-wiki).  We also don't intend to make a distinction between submissions by Foundation staff and the other community members, though we expect that many presentations that would have been proposals by staff will end up being invited directly by the programming committee leaving more "slots" available to the CFP.

-- Marc



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