Both BSDCan and PGCon use Pentabarf for accepting and reviewing proposals for talks. An issue raised in 2009 highlighted the ability to see the speaker name when review the list of submissions. It is a bit of very useful information.
This year, I’ve found out that we can see that vital data. Provided the speaker role has been set to confirmed. I think Pentabarf design assumes that you have created a talk, and then try to find speakers. The default value of speaker role is ‘offer’. It is not until the role is set to ‘confirmed’ that the speaker name starts to turn up in lists. I can see the logic behind this choice. However, it does not suit the way we work.
Fortunately, with SQL, there is a practical solution.
UPDATE event_person SET event_role_state = 'confirmed' WHERE event_id IN (SELECT event_id FROM event WHERE conference_id = XXXX) AND event_role = 'speaker';
where XXXX is the conference you wish to adjust.
I recommend wrapping the above in a transaction and reviewing your chance with the following query before you commit:
SELECT EP.*
FROM event_person EP, event E
WHERE EP.event_id = E.event_id
AND E.conference_id=XXXX
AND event_role = ‘speaker’;
Hope that helps.
