The re:publica Programme Committee: What Is It and How Does It Work?

The re:publica is a festival for the community that is organized around the active participation and contribution of the community! We want to be a space for sustainable and inclusive exchange, where both the speakers and the visitors get awed and inspired.

The re:publica is growing and our responsibility to put together a high-quality programme is growing with it. This is something we are very aware of.

We already received over 900 entries for rpTEN – and it’s going to be even more this year! The programme team isn’t able to check through this fantastic amount of entries with the care and diligence that they deserve. We want to ensure that all the entries receive undivided attention and that decisions aren’t made under duress due to lack of time.

That’s why, last year, we successfully worked together with a programme committee for the first time. We’d like to repeat that for the #rp17 and expand it further. We are thrilled about the commitment of these experts, who will be offering up their time to support the programme team in an advisory capacity!

Transparency and clarity in our programme planning is extremely important to us, as anything else would harm the re:publica and, therefore, us all.

The programme committee is made up of professionals, community leaders and speakers who have been accompanying us for many years now and who know the re:publica and its guiding principle well. They get an insight into the re:publica programme to help them assess the submitted sessions. That way we can ensure that diverse perspectives and voices are well represented.

In addition, the members of the new programme committee each receive between 25 and 50 carefully selected sessions for evaluation, compatible to their respective categories. Your sessions are submitted to them anonymously, so that the content of your entries is front and center. The members of the programme committee can then rate the session and write a commentary. The re:publica programme team subsequently takes these ratings and commentaries into account when putting together your talks, workshops, discussions and various activities.

As we don’t want to stop the members of the programme committee from entering the Call for Participation themselves, we precisely monitor who we give what sessions to for rating, so that we can prevent bias.

Decisions concerning the programme are not made by individuals, but by a team! Our programme team is made up of people who we know we can get behind and who work with the greatest possible diligence and integrity.

We’d like to say a big thank you to the members of the programme committee and, above all, you for your diverse and exciting entries for the Call for Participation! We’re just as excited about the assessment and completed programme as you are!

See a list of all the people involved in the programme selection over here.

Image credit: Gregor Fischer/re:publica (CC BY-SA 2.0)