Before any of the rest of this, I want to say that this is a useful article for people as conferences actually do think like this, but my comment is then to point out that not all conferences do, and that I generally prefer attending ones which don't.
> The premise is good, but the abstract is so short we have no idea where this is going to go. Even if the speaker were experienced and a known conference superstar, it is hard to give the presenter a speaking slot without more detail.
When you go to a performance by a standup comedian, you don't read an abstract first: if there is even a title it is probably arbitrary or a gag.
When I go to a conference and am choosing to bother going to see a talk, I select talks based on who is speaking, not based on their abstract.
In my experience, a good speaker is interesting no matter what they are talking about, and otherwise the talk ends up being disappointing no matter how on point the abstract is to my interests.
You might then ask: "but surely the good speaker is capable of making a good abstract?", but the best talks are also coordinated and topical and deep.
The person whose talks I most enjoy and now never miss is essentially incapable of making an abstract ahead of time, as his talk is based on his thoughts and passions at that moment, and are about topics so compelling that after the talk I would have a hard time summarizing it other than "you really should have been there".
You might then ask "but is the speaker actually good if the audience member can't summarize the talk?", and I will claim the exact opposite: if you can replace the talk with a summary of the content and (maybe) the slides, you should not be wasting anyone's time with a talk.
This is something both many conferences and many attendees fundamentally seem to not "get": they ask for peoples' slides, as if they have meaning. One may as well ask for a photograph of the empty sets for a play they missed instead of a video of the performance, that is how much content you can recover from the slides and abstract of a good talk.
> It’s crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it’s also risky to entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before.
But this is also how you get extremely loyal speakers who will speak at your conference for free while refusing to even bother speaking at other venues. It is also how you manage to show your audience "something new" instead of "the same old people that every conference gets to speak as they are the safe bet / known quantity".
The absolute best regular conference I go to, by far, gets all of this: the couple that runs 360|iDev works with new speakers to hone ideas (many speakers I have talked to are incredibly grateful to this conference for giving them "their break"), but doesn't even bother with an approval process for known good speakers, and they then aren't afraid to have sessions at their conference with neither a title nor an abstract, just a name, a bio, and a "placeholder" title and abstract that are devoid of content. It is seriously the only conference where I really find myself interested to bother attending any of the talks past "I guess I absolutely need to try to see this so I can talk about it with other people tonight sigh".
Expanding into the category of atypical conferences, XOXO takes the cake, but it is half-festival, was never sure if it was anything more than a temporary concept, and doesn't really have a "topic" that is easy to describe. But, the Andy's hand-nurture first-time speakers based on core attendees and prior speakers "nominating" people they really want to see give talks, many of whom are artists or bloggers who might even "perform" in various ways but have never given a talk. The schedule has names and bios, but not a single title or abstract.