I don't know of anyone that _wants_ multiple tracks.

On the other hand, some people want a bigger conference, and reluctantly
agree that a bigger conference neccesarily means multiple tracks. (And I
can respect that). Is that what you mean?

I'm pretty opposed to dividing people up on 'novice', 'intermediate', or
'expert'.  Part of the good of code4lib is mixing these all up; and
people that are novice on one thing are expert on another; and people
who may think they are novice may really be expert and vice versa.

Tracks could possibly be divided up on topic matter instead. But again,
part of what I think many of us like on code4lib is not segregating
ourselves like this, and I'm not sure we'd know what the 'topics' would
be. (And then accept proposals that need to be targetted toward a
'topic', and only accept so many per topic?)

I wonder, if the conference is to be bigger, neccesitating multiple
simultaneous presentations since not everyone can fit in a room at
once....   just divide em more or less randomly?  If we could accept 30
proposals this year in one big room, accept 60 in two big rooms instead,
and just divide the 60 up between the two rooms more or less
arbitrarily?  At any given time, you'd have two presentations avail, and
you'd go to the one you found most interesting.  But this would mean
people switching back and forth rooms a lot, which can be inconvenient
in a very large room; plus, with only 20 minute presentations, it's
probably hard to keep them synchronized between the two rooms, so that
would make it harder to switch back and forth too.

Hmm, so maybe that won't work.

I'm not sure. I can respect if people want a larger conference, and that
that means something other than everyone in the same room at once... but
I still really don't like splitting people between 'novice' and
'expert', while that might work in a conference focused on a very
specific technology (a programming language, a CMS), I don't think it
works at all in a conference based on a 'community' or 'domain'
involving many technologies and many areas of work, like ours. It's not
at all clear who's 'novice' and who's 'expert'.

But I'm not sure what would work. Maybe it's topic-based tracks after
all, as much as I don't like that either, it's better than novice/expert.

I guess maybe I'd like to hear from the people strongly advocating for a
bigger conference, like dchud, what their ideas are for how to handle a
larger conference where everyone can't be in the same room at once, how
you split people up.

Jonathan