[ValentineC]

Ah, I forgot to add: evaluating talks purely on anonymous talk proposals.

I admire conferences that rigorously aim for blind selection to give all speaker candidates a fair chance, but I feel that the audience occasionally gets the short end of the stick with a bad presenter.

> So what would work better?

I think a two-pass approach could work better.

The first anonymised pass is for rating and commenting on the written talk proposals.

A second pass, with candidate names revealed, would help fine-tune the lineup and make sure that it's the best it can be. It could also include watching the candidate's talks at other conferences, to see if they're good at communicating their ideas.