Workshop Series | Public speaking

Proposing Your First Conference Talk

Giving conference talks is a game changer. Speaking can propel a career forward, expand your network considerably, and lead to wonderfully surprising opportunities.

You get to learn and be inspired, as well as share. You get free tickets to a conference you may never have been able to attend another way. Some also pay for travel, lodging, and/or honorarium.

As a speaker, you get to have lively conversations with peers and idols, about the topics that most fascinate you personally.

Come learn about how to get started, and get some practical skills for doing your first proposal:

• how to find relevant opportunities
  
• dissecting calls for proposals (CFPs)
  
• evaluating CFPs for fit with you
  
• questions it's cool to ask organizers
  
• the darned fair expectations to hold
  
• brainstorming a topic
  
• writing abstracts

By the end of this workshop, you'll have come up with a talk idea or two, prepped a proposal, and identified a conference to propose it to.

ABOUT CARINA
Carina C. Zona is a San Francisco-based engineer, advocate, and developer evangelist. She speaks at dozens of programmers' conferences around the world, including keynoting PyCon Australia 2015 and Open Source Bridge 2015. She is the founder of CallbackWomen, which aggregates CFPs of 900+ professional programmers' conferences, raises visibility of CFP features that are especially relevant for women's participation, and promotes the expertise of tech women who speak at conferences. Carina reads hundreds of conferences' calls for proposals (CFPs) per year. As a member of the program committees for O'Reilly's Fluent and OSCON, she has evaluated hundreds of speaking proposals.