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2013-03-21
Secrets To Success: How To Propose A Talk And Get It Accepted
Laura Thomson@lxt
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Overview
✤ Coming up with a talk topic
✤ Different types of talks
✤ Submission process
✤ Writing successful proposals
✤ What talk selectors look for
✤ Transforming your proposal into a successful talk!
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What should I talk about?
Brainstorm ideas:
✤ What technologies are you familiar with?
✤ What interesting problems have you solved?
✤ What is something you know about that others may not?
✤ What are you passionate about?
✤ The ideal topic is something you could talk about to a friend for 20 minutes without slides.
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Where should I submit my talk?
✤ It’s not quite as simple as topic -> submit
✤ Sometimes it’s see a CFP -> come up with a topic-> submit
✤ Sometimes it’s get asked to speak: fill in at a UG, talk about a project you’ve been working on, etc
✤ Choose a venue that you feel comfortable with. If you’re nervous, start small and work your way up. You can start higher up if confident.
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Talk venues
✤ Workplace brown-bag
✤ User group: these *always* need speakers
✤ Local conference: often on a single topic, may be attended by locals only
✤ National/international conference: attracts people from all over
✤ “Big” conference: some are harder to get in to than others (OSCON, PyCon are examples)
✤ Keynotes, TED, etc: invitation only
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Submission and review process
Typical conference process:
✤ CFP posted
✤ Submissions must be in by a deadline
✤ Somebody reviews submissions
✤ Clear acceptances and rejections sent
✤ Second round acceptances and rejections sent
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Types of talksWhat to talk about and where
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Technology teaching
✤ Examples:
✤ Aura for PHP
✤ Node.js in 45 minutes
✤ Focused is better than broad
✤ Who should give this talk and where?
✤ Someone who knows the topic well, at a tech-appropriate venue
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Broader technology skills
✤ Examples:
✤ Test driven development
✤ Continuous deployment
✤ Writing secure code
✤ Typically cover a range of techniques, and can be various lengths
✤ Who should give this type of talk and where?
✤ Someone who knows the topic well, in virtually any conference
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Vendor talks
✤ Examples:
✤ Acme Platform for App development
✤ Be careful where you submit this type of talk
✤ Many FOSS conferences do not look favorably on these submissions
✤ Some conferences have a vendor track or speaking slots for sponsors
✤ Some conferences are all vendor, all the time
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Case studies and War Stories
✤ Examples
✤ Migrating your big data from A to B
✤ How our data center survived an earthquake
✤ Rewriting famous.com in Ruby
✤ Needs to have broad appeal: Why is it interesting? Well known? Popular site or library? Innovative architecture or solution? Big #s?
✤ This is the perfect talk when you’ve just done something and want to talk about it
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Your FOSS project
✤ Examples
✤ Flask for beginners
✤ How to get started contributing to Drupal
✤ Writing documentation for the Mozilla Developer Network
✤ Who should give this and where:
✤ People who are passionate and knowledgable about a project which has either lots of users or lots of interest, at a tech-appropriate conference
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State of the X
✤ Examples:
✤ State of the Onion
✤ State of PHP in 2013
✤ All those “New Features in PHP 5.4” type talks
✤ Who should give this type of talk and where?
✤ Ideally, project leads or core developers. (For smaller conferences or user groups, could be someone else.)
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Random stuff from left field
✤ Examples:
✤ Teaching git using toys
✤ How to build a laser
✤ A history of software failure
✤ These talks, if good, will leave people talking for weeks
✤ You have to be able to pull this off (and be able to convince reviewers you will) - probably not a great entree into conference speaking
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Aside: Tutorials and Workshops
✤ Talk for somewhere from 2-8 hours.
✤ Usually hands-on with exercises, coding, etc
✤ Take a lot of work to prepare!
✤ Often more incentive for the speaker in terms of travel costs, honorariums, etc
✤ Fun! But maybe not a good thing to do first time around.
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Aside: Panels
✤ Can seem an easy way to get started, because you don’t need slides
✤ BUT - be prepared, make notes, plan what you’re going to say
✤ Make sure you have a moderator who knows what they are doing
✤ Be clear of your role and the agenda and ideally the questions being asked
✤ Avoid tokenism: “Can you be the PHP dev among Java devs?” etc
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Aside: Lightning Talks and Ignite
✤ Pro: you only have to talk for five minutes!
✤ Cons: depending on the venue, these can be very competitive. Also, it’s hard to say something interesting and valuable in five minutes. These can be harder than you might expect.
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Calls for PapersWhat they want, and how to deliver it
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Call for Papers
✤ Types of talks
✤ Length of talks
✤ Theme of conference
✤ Desired topics
✤ Submission process
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Interpreting the CFP
✤ The CFP will tell you about the target audience, conference theme, and desired topics
✤ Best tip: look at previous year’s schedules and abstracts to see what types of talks are accepted. Study the titles, descriptions and abstracts.
✤ Some conferences will even show how attendees rated the talks. You might see, for example, that all framework related talks were rated 1/5. This will decrease the chance of such talks being accepted in future.
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Example- php|tek
✤ PHP Community specific conference
✤ Taken from http://tek.phparch.com/call-for-papers/
✤ Currently closed (but you can start planning for next year!)
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What the organizers want
“...we’re looking for talks that address the grown-up needs of a grown-up enterprise language, such as:
✤ TDD, Continuous Integration, DevOps or other “process”-oriented subjects
✤ New modern language constructs in PHP such as closures, traits, late static binding, etc.
✤ APIs and integration with other technologies
✤ Performance and scaling
✤ Mobile development
…and the usual plethora of PHP adjacent technologies, such as HTML5, JavaScript, Capistrano, etc., that are required to meet the needs of serious modern sites.”
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Fitting the CFP
✤ Does my existing idea fit the CFP? Let’s see:
✤ Automating the PHP release process - yes!
✤ How we scaled [company] to one billion users with PHP - yes!
✤ Writing games with PHP - probably not, given the enterprise focus
✤ Why Rails is still better than Symfony - maybe, hard to say
✤ Convincing your boss to use PHP - probably not
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Example - MySQL Connect
✤ (Currently OPEN)
✤ Taken from http://www.oracle.com/mysqlconnect/call-for-papers/information/index.html
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Key point - vendor conference
✤ “Oracle OpenWorld is organized by Products and Services tracks, and by Solutions tracks. When submitting a proposal, at least one product or service must be chosen from the pulldown list.”
✤ This is a (set of) conference(s) run by a vendor. Topics are related to their products and services.
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Aside: Tracks at conferences
✤ Small conferences are single or double track; larger ones have more
✤ Sometimes you will be asked to nominate which track your talk falls into, and sometimes the organizers will do this for you, or generate the track list organically
✤ In this conference CFP, the tracks are described in detail, for example:
“Architecture and Application Development: How should you architect and develop your MySQL-based applications? What are the latest trends and best practices? Get answers to those questions and more by attending this track’s presentations.”
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Key points - Specific guidelines
Some are generally good advice:
✤ “Do explicitly mention what is being discussed during the session rather than making a blatant marketing or strategy pitch. For example, include mention of product demonstration, case study, customer/partner participation, quantitative facts, etc.”
Some are specific to this conference:
✤ “Use present tense in session descriptions.”...”Do not use first person”
✤ “You must use the full Oracle product name at all times.”
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Example: OSCON
✤ Currently closed for 2013 (but not announced schedule)
✤ Taken from
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/cfp/251
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Topics vs Tracks
“Some of the topics we’re eager to see on the 2013 conference program are:
✤ How expanding one’s skills beyond a core competency makes for a better technologist
✤ Best practices for building a business around open source
✤ Innovations in user experience such as interfaces, design, and usability
✤ Cultural changes due to ubiquitous networks and computing devices
✤ Cloud computing, and openness in distributed services
✤ Geek lifestyle—hacking, productivity tips, maker culture
✤ Open web, open standards, and open data”
✤Leadership in the changing open source culture
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Tracks (excerpt)
✤ Community
✤ Data
✤ Geek Lifestyle
✤ Java & JVM
✤ Javascript
✤ Ops
✤ Perl
✤ PHP
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How do I interpret this?
✤ This conference takes technology specific talks, more general tech talks, and a bunch of other stuff
✤ (That actually makes it a lot harder to know what the committee is looking for)
✤ Again, looking at previous years’ programs is the best guideline as to what is wanted
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Writing your proposalAnswer the call!
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What you need
✤ A title
✤ An abstract (sometimes)
✤ A description
✤ Your bio
✤ Sample talk (sometimes)
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Titles
✤ Seriously, a good title will help you.
✤ The straightforward kind: “Object Oriented PHP”
✤ The obscure kind: “What I did on my summer vacation”
✤ The funny kind: “How not to release software”
✤ Title + subtitle can be a way to win at both funny and straightforward.
✤ You need to tell people what the talk is about, and deliver that, otherwise they will be unhappy
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Abstracts, Descriptions
✤ Sometimes there is only one field for this, sometimes two
✤ If there are two, DO NOT USE THE SAME CONTENT FOR BOTH
✤ Try to give a brief outline of the talk. What will be the main sections you will cover? I have seen extremely detailed outlines (down to the minute).
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Abstract - Examples
Practicing Deployment:
✤ “Web developers dream of continuous deployment: new code in production without a hitch. In this talk I'll cover the full story from building deployable code through working out a build and release process through continuous integration, automation, and continuous deployment. We'll also look at deployment velocity and why CD might not be for you.”
How not to release software:
✤ “You've seen a million best practice talks. This is quite the opposite: I'll instruct you in the ways I've failed over twenty years of software development, and advise you how not to make the same mistakes.”
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Description - Example
“Deployment can be a real bugbear for many web developers. From building something easy to deploy and manage; to coming up with a repeatable, consistent process; to continuous deployment…deployment can keep you up at night for months on end.
In this talk I’ll cover the following topics:
✤ How to build a deployable application, from technology choice to instrumentation
✤ Deployment velocity: Why your process matters more than how often you deploy
✤ Deployment tools and processes: How to automate your troubles away
✤ CI/Automated testing: Know you’re deploying something good, or at least how worried you should be about it
✤ Automated testing vs monitoring: How they converge
✤ When are you ready to deploy continuously? How do you make the jump?”
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Description - Example
“As your team grows and your projects become more complex, you’re going to need a certain amount of process. In this talk I’ll explain how to add enough engineering management to be effective without driving engineers crazy. I’ll discuss:
✤ Basics of chaordic systems (or: how open source projects succeed without project management)
✤ Building trust and preserving autonomy
✤ Effective communication practices for IRC, email, and bugs
✤ The meetings you have to have, and the ones you should avoid
✤ Architecture design and problem solving in a less-structured environment
....
Attendees should leave the session with a plan to optimize their teams for developer happiness and shipping great code.”
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Key point: enough information
✤ You need to provide enough information for somebody evaluating the talk to make a decision as to whether it’s a good talk, and whether it’s a better talk than the other one on the same topic.
✤ Many one sentence abstracts for perfectly good talks have been rejected.
✤ You also need to show you have enough knowledge in the area to give a talk on the topic.
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Your bio
✤ Take this seriously.
✤ Unless you are a language author or similar luminary, you should establish your credentials and why you are qualified to give this talk.
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Example
“Laura Thomson is an Engineering Manager at Mozilla, after spending much of the previous decade as a consultant and trainer on various Open Source technologies.
Laura is the co-author of “PHP and MySQL Web Development” and “MySQL Tutorial”. She is a veteran speaker at Open Source conferences world wide.”
(This can be a lot longer, too.)
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Sample talks
✤ Some conferences now ask for a video of you talking.
✤ If this is not your first rodeo, easy!
✤ If it is, need to figure out a plan. Don’t Panic!
✤ Give a lightning talk to camera - get a friend to help you. Practice!
✤ Talk at user group/brownbag and get someone to record it.
✤ Quality of video is less important than you being a confident and clear presenter.
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What selectors look for(and why you might get rejected even if you do everything right)
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Who’s reviewing my talk?
✤ Sometimes a single person, sometimes a committee, sometimes crowd sourced. You can often find out who the reviewers are, and play to their biases.
✤ In a multi-technology conference, they might not know why your topic is interesting: establish this in your description
✤ Sometimes topic matter experts, and sometimes not. Cater to both in your description.
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It’s really simple
✤ Something the audience of our conference will like
✤ On an appropriate topic
✤ From a speaker with authority
✤ Where the submission has enough detail for us to judge that it’s good
✤ (That’s it. Really.)
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Reasons to rejectWhy don’t they like me?
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You broke the rules
✤ You didn’t give enough detail to establish a good talk
✤ You didn’t give enough bio to establish creds
✤ Completely off topic (“Why you should switch to Ruby” at a PHP conference)
✤ Vendor talk at an open source conference
✤ Offensive content, etc
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Not bad, but...
✤ Doesn’t match the conference audience (too novice/advanced)
✤ Doesn’t match this year’s theme
✤ We had something like this last year and it was poorly attended
✤ “This type of talk is always unpopular”
✤ This has been done a bunch of times (especially intro talks)
✤ Nothing new here (typically well established technologies)
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Multiple talks on the same topic
✤ We get two (or five, or twelve) talks on the same or similar topics
✤ For some reason we didn’t pick yours
✤ (Did you write a great bio and abstract?)
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Sometimes you get Rasmused
✤ “The State of PHP in 2013” - Jane Smith
✤ “The State of PHP in 2013” - Rasmus Lerdorf
✤ This happens more often than you would expect!
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Other reasons
✤ You behaved badly at a previous conference
✤ You were rude to the conference organizers or committee
✤ There is enmity between your project/company and the conference organizer’s project/company
✤ Life advice: try to avoid getting into these situations in the first place.
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Yay! I got acceptedNow what?
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Turning your proposal into a talk
✤ Remember that detailed outline...?
✤ Each dot point/section is a section in your talk. Outline, and then fill it out. It’s how I wrote this talk. Easy!
✤ Next talk today will cover this in infinite detail!
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A final note for the unwary
✤ Presentation-driven development should be avoided at all costs