Inside CFP Selection: How AWS Community DACH Ranks 151 Talk Submissions

The AWS Community DACH association uses a three-round process to evaluate conference talk submissions, with content reviewers employing a chess-inspired Elo rating system via Sessionize to rank proposals. This year, the selection committee screened 151 submissions, with evaluators spending an average of 87 seconds per session reviewing abstracts and speaker profiles over roughly three and a half hours total. The Elo-based comparison mode presents three sessions simultaneously, asking reviewers to rank them relative to each other rather than assign absolute scores, producing a near-Gaussian ratings distribution. Reviewers must declare conflicts of interest and can flag submissions that are off-topic or outside their expertise, helping keep the process fair and transparent. A final board review balances the ranked list for speaker diversity, topic variety, and overall programme coherence before selections are confirmed.