We’re very pleased to invite all members of the Django community to submit their talk proposals for DjangoCon Europe 2013. We’re looking for Django and Python enthusiasts, pioneers, adventurers and anyone else who would like to share their Django achievements and experiments with the rest of the community.
This Call for Papers closes on January 8th 2013 at midnight CET.
Guidelines
Submit your proposal by January 8th, 23:59:59 CET. No late submissions, no excuses.
All talks need to be in English. Don’t worry if you think your English isn’t good enough; as long as you can be understood, that’s really good enough.
Most talks will be 30 minutes long (we may get in touch to ask if you’d like to speak for longer), including time for questions and answers. Our tight schedule means we’ll need to enforce the time limit rigorously, so we suggest timing your presentation in advance.
Make sure you care, and make sure we see you care. Typos, sloppy formatting and all-lowercase submissions make our reading of your proposal more difficult. If your proposal is hard to read or understand, that will definitely count against it.
Don’t overdo it either. If you need more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, you need to slim things down. We’ll get a large number of submissions, so the quicker you can to make a good impression, the better.
We favour original content. If you want to discuss something that you have talked about elsewhere, try to add a twist, or new research, or development - something the community won’t have heard already. Of course, if your talk is plain awesome as-is, go for that!
The Selection Process
We’re expecting many (70-150) excellent proposals, and we have around 20 speaking slots. The process we’ll use to help us select the most appropriate ones for the event is roughly this:
- Anonymise submissions, to eliminate bias.
- The first round of voting is yours: we invite Django community to rate anonymised topics on a scientific 3-point scale (“meh”, “yay”, “MUST HAVE”).
- De-anonymise for the final selection.
Speakers’ Perks
If you’re selected as a speaker, here’s what you’ll get:
- Entrance to the conference. The first batch of tickets may be gone before we announce the speakers, so it would be wise to purchase your ticket anyway. If you are selected to speak, and if you need to, we can refund the price of your ticket (but if you don’t, we can spend more money on making the conference more awesome!).
- Accommodation in Warsaw in a fancy hotel (with free WiFi, of course) near the venue for the days of the conference and a day before and after (i.e. May 14th-20th). If your employer or sponsor covers your accommodation, we’ll be pleased to advertise them as a sponsor of the conference. The money we save will be used to make the event even more awesome (you might see a pattern here …).
- An awesome speaker’s bag with local goodies, just to say a little thank-you from all the Django community.
Note: if we are able to, we will cover the cost of speakers’ travel. We can’t promise anything at this stage, but as we get closer to the date, if we are able to offer our speakers a nice surprise, we will.
If you know you won’t be able to afford the cost of travel to Warsaw, please make that clear in your submission. It won’t affect your chances of selection but it will give us an idea of how many speakers are in that situation.
We Can Help
Not everybody is a natural talent on stage. Not everybody can produce kick-ass slide-shows. Not everybody is a live-demo-god. Not everybody even knows they have something great to talk about - yet.
So, there might be a million reasons why you don’t consider yourself a potential speaker at DjangoCon Europe, where all your heroes have spoken in the past. We’d like to change your mind about that.
If you think you have something that would be worth sharing, we are here to reach out and help you develop or hone the skills you think you need to deliver a great presentation on the subject.
- We are happy to brainstorm your interests to see if a great topic is hiding.
- We can put you in touch with experienced speakers to help prepare your submission, or you can refer to the “Example Submission” section below for tips.
- We are happy to review and advise on how to produce a slide deck.
- If you need practice giving talks, get in touch; we can hook you up with a local group or set up a stage for you and a bunch of friends in advance, so you can practise in front of a friendly crowd.
- We can arrange a rehearsal evening the day before the conference to help you feel better in our amazing circus.
- If you are worried that your English is not fluent enough, we can put you in touch with a native English speaker, who can look over your proposal, talk or slides, make suggestions, corrections and improvements, and generally help you feel confident that you’ll be able to express yourself clearly and effectively to the audience.
- Again, whatever else you might need, we’re here to help.
So get in touch: hello@djangocircus.com (just don’t use this to submit a proposal).
Example Submission
If you need inspiration, take a look on one of the submission from the previous year:
Topic: I hate your database
After years of working with all sorts of databases and wrangling with South to support just five of them, I take a look at databases (relational, document, key-value and more) and at some of the problems that Django programmers often come across with them.
The talk will cover (among other things) the disadvantages of relational databases, why “NoSQL” isn’t always the answer, the pains of storing geographic data, a small amount of database theory, and the very small number of good things about MySQL.
One more thing…
Diversity. As part of the Django community, we share its commitment to diversity, openness and inclusivity. Diversity is a difficult ideal to achieve, particularly at a technology conference, but we are aware of the challenges and promise to do our best to work towards the ideal.
We have adopted the PyCon Code of Conduct as a model for this event, and we expect all attendees to abide by it and respect its principles. With a team like this and the support of the community, we can’t fail to make DjangoCon Europe 2013 an event that all Djangonauts can participate in and enjoy, can we?
Submit Your Talk
Congratulations if you’ve reached this far. Now go ahead and submit your talk:
Huge thanks to JSConf EU for inspiration, help and their Call for Proposal, which we’ve based this one on. We also want to thank Daniele for his help with proofreading this. Of course, feel free to grab anything we do to make this conference awesome on GitHub! In case of any questions or difficulty, please contact us at hello@djangocircus.com.
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