The following best practices are useful when submitting a talk proposal for PyCon. They're gathered from members of the Program Committee, who are tasked with creating the schedule of talks.
The deadline for PyCon 2016 proposals is .
As much as possible, try to submit your proposal as early as you can in the call for proposals to take advantage of the program committee's reviewers. By submitting early you gain an advantage that later submitters don't get: the reviewers will provide constructive feedback to help you make a better proposal, which you can then apply to the proposal before they're evaluated both individually and in comparison to other similar proposals.
The PyCon proposal form contains several fields to describe your topic, approach, and any supporting details.
A couple of words represent all of the work you put into a proposal; your slides, the rehearsals, and everything else about it. The title is your chance to attract people, and it's also one of the few ways to find your presentation after you give it.
- Substance is often more valuable than flash. If your title doesn't allude to the topic you're talking about, you may need to spend more work in the description to hook people.
- Try to keep it short. A full sentence title is often harder to remember, thus harder to search for.
PyCon has a limited number of 45 minute talk slots, and asking for one is merely a suggestion to the program committee chair who constructs the schedule. If you think you have a 45 minute talk, go ahead and select it, but be aware that it might not fit in the schedule and you may instead be offered a 30 minute slot.
Your description will end up both in our printed program and in the online schedule. It's limited to 400 characters, so it's a nice supplement to your title.
A few sentences to introduce the topics and goals of your proposal will make for a good description.
Since PyCon attracts a wide range of people across a broad range of skill sets, you're going to end up with some attendees who are learning your topic for the first time, some who know about it, some know it, and sometimes even the people who created it. Who do you want to reach out to the most of all? Who do you want to hear questions from at the end?
Be as accurate as you can be. A lot of people come into PyCon looking for talks that will help them level up, so you may get a beginner who is going to try and attend a bunch of intermediate talks and push themselves. If we're all fairly accurate, we can put information in that person's hands that is within reach to help them learn.
What do you want people to get out of your presentation? Think about what you'd want to talk about in the hallway or at lunch with your talk's attendees. What do you want your attendees to tell their friends about?
This text ends up on our website, clickable from the schedule and talk lists. This is where you explain in paragraph form what you're going to talk about for 30-45 minutes.
Let readers know why you're giving this talk. Why is the topic important? What are the issues surrounding the topic? What are solutions to those issues? This is where you expand on the short description you started with.
This field is Markdown enabled.
The outline helps reviewers get a feel for your level of preparedness on the topic as well as how organized your thoughts are in covering the topic in a live presentation. If you've thought about how much time you want to spend in a particular area, listing the timings can be helpful.
You don't need to have your presentation finalized when you're proposing it, so don't worry if the outline isn't fully finalized.
This field is only visible to reviewers.