Call for Speakers

“JSConf EU — This is your conference.”

We are inviting the JavaScript community to submit talks for the upcoming JSConf EU (Friday September 25th and Sunday 27th, Berlin). This Call for Presentation closes on May 31st.

This is what we call a “Hybrid CFP”: If you think you have something great to talk about, tell us all about it and we consider your entry. If you know someone who has something great to talk about, nominate them. And if you are interested in hearing about a particular topic, nominate the topic, and we can try and find a match.

Topics

To get a feel for what we are interested in hearing about, here is the programme for the past years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014).

We like to see anything that squarely fits into the spectrum of:

• Cutting-edge technological advances in the world of JavaScript or computer science in general, if somehow applicable to JavaScript.
• Wild Ideas & Clever Hacks.
• Improving JavaScript developers’ lives.
• Mobile JS.
• Embedded JS.
• Hardware JS.
• Fundamentals, in a modern light.
• The JavaScript community, culture, history, past, present & future, the why the who and the what of what we’re all doing.
• And finally: Whatever the hell you want; this is your conference.

We Can Help

Not everybody is a natural talent on stage. Not everybody can produce kick-ass slide-decks. Not everybody is a live-demo-god. Not everybody knows they have something great to talk about.

There are about a million reasons why you don’t consider yourself a speaker, let alone at JSConf EU, where all your heroes have spoken in the past. We are here to prove you wrong. If all you have is a gut feeling that you should be on stage, we are here to help you to develop or hone the skills you think you lack to deliver a great presentation.

• We are happy to brainstorm your interests to see if a great topic is hiding.
• We are happy to connect you 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 don’t feel creative, just use our Keynote or PowerPoint templates.
• If you need practice giving talks, get in touch, we can hook you up with local groups or set up a stage for you and a bunch of friends in advance, so you can practice in front of a friendly crowd.
• Again, whatever else you might need, we’re here to help.

Get in touch: contact@jsconf.eu (just don’t use this to submit a proposal).

If you need more encouragement, check out co-organiser Tiffany’s site We Are All Awesome that tries to convince you to speak.

Previous Speaker’s Experiences

If you still need convincing, here are a few select quotes from previous speakers:

“As a speaker, I was treated like royalty.” — @ireneros

“I enjoyed all of the variety of the talks. There really was something for everyone.” — @angelinamagnum

“If anything important or surprising was going to happen with JavaScript, it was going to happen here.” — @stuartmemo

“I would speak again in a heartbeat.” — @EamonLeonard, @rem, @angelinamagnum

“The staff & organizers were absolutely fabulous!” — @nexxylove

“I heard that the talks are always amazing and I thought that getting the opportunity to speak alongside such wonderful speakers would be an honor. And it was. I also really appreciate the organizers’ dedication to diversity and creating an open and comfortable environment for all participants.” — @ireneros

“It kick-started a speaking circuit.” — @angelinamagnum

“I love the fact that off-the-wall talks are encouraged and promoted.” — @johnbender

“Ever since, people keep asking me to do more public speaking.” — @nexxylove

“I just felt like any other normal attendee — and that’s a good thing!” — @jviereck

“I had a lot of offers for more public speaking based solely on my talk. It also gave me confidence to do other talks having done a big one like JSConf EU.” — @stuartmemo

“The organizers were on point with everything, the accommodations were lovely, and all the participants were delightful to interact with.” — @angelinamagnum

“I have seen an increased number of invitations to talk by other conferences.” — @olov

“I most enjoyed the feedback and discussions afterwards. Seeing people’s reaction to your talk is so so gratifying.” — @stuartmemo

“Absolutely fantastic.” — @mraleph

The Perks

If you get selected as a speaker at JSConf EU, here’s what you get:

• Travel to Berlin covered. This usually means we pay for your plane or train ticket. We are happy to assist with booking your itinerary, but if you can do it yourself, we can focus on making the conference more awesome.

• Entrance to the conference. We won’t be done with the speaker selections by the end of the ticket sales, so if you want to make sure you can attend, you may want to purchase a ticket regardless. If you get selected to speak and if you need to, we can refund your ticket, but if we don’t, we can spend more money on making the conference more awesome.

• We cover your stay in Berlin in a hotel near the venue (including free Wifi) for the days of the conference and a day before and after (i.e. September 24th-28th). If you want to stay longer, we can arrange things, just let us know. You will have to cover extra nights, though. There will be satellite events in the week before and possibly after JSConf.

If your employer can cover your travel and hotel, we are happy to list them as an awesome company sponsor. The money we save will be used to make the conference more awesome. (You might see a pattern …)

If you have any special requirements, non-return trips (say you are coming from another conference), just let us know, we can usually work these things out. Just note that every minute we spend on this, we don’t spend on making the conference more awesome ;)

If you want to bring a significant other, or bring your kid(s) and need child-care to be sorted out for the time of the conference, please also get in touch. We are here to make this easy for you!

The Selection Process

Here’s roughly how we pick our talks:

• Anonymize submissions, so we don’t bias against anything related to the submitting person.
• Two rounds of voting:
  1. The first round rates each talk on a scale from 1 to 10.
  2. The top-N (~50) submissions are rated again on a 3-point scale: “meh”, “yay”, “MUST HAVE”.
• De-anonymize so we can (finally) bias against speaker details. Based on our budget, we might opt for a local or at least closer-by (read: cheaper to transport) speaker.

…and a number of details that we make up as we go along.

We expect 100-200 excellent submissions for 30-40 speaking slots. The process helps us to select the right ones.

Read all about how this went down in 2012 and how we arrived at an amazing number of 25% women speakers.

Example Submission

Here’s a proposal that we accepted in 2012:

JavaScript is the new Punk Rock

On 4th June 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. It was an event that changed the world forever. There were only about 40 people there, but those who attended were inspired to form their own bands, creating Joy Division, The Buzzcocks, The Fall and The Smiths. As these bands fade away, we’re long overdue for another such event. Programmers are artists, and JavaScript is the new Punk Rock.

My talk will show that JavaScript can be used to write and perform music using the wonderful Web Audio API. I’ll talk about why we should do this and why it’s the future of music. By the time the conference is over you’ll have burned your guitar, remixed a dozen tunes on GitHub, and started a JavaScript band that has its sights set on changing the world.

Guidelines

Submit your proposal by May 31st 2015, 23:59:59 CEST. No excuses.

All talks are in English.

Talks are usually 30 minutes long (for longer talks we’d get in touch with you directly). There is no Q&A. We will be on a tight schedule and enforce the end of a talk rigorously. We strongly encourage 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 tedious. These things will definitely count against your proposal.

Don’t overdo it either. If you need more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, we need to ask you to slim things down. With the amount of submissions we get, the quicker you can to make a good impression, the better.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” — Blaise Pascal

Original Topics. One of the things we like to do with JSConf EU is to push the community forward. We can’t do this if the same people keep talking about the same things all the time. Thus, we favour original content. If you want to discuss a topic that you have talked about elsewhere, try to add a twist, or new research, or development, something unique. Of course, if your talk is plain awesome as-is, go for that :)

Misc

All talks will be recorded and published on the internet for free, along with a recording of the slide deck, live-demo or other on-presenter-screen activity as well as a transcript and subtitles.

We do this for the benefit of the larger JavaScript community and those who can’t make it to the conference. We hope you want to help out, but if you are in any way uncomfortable, let us know and we will work things out.

Finally, since you retain full ownership of your slides and recording, we’d like to ask you to make your materials and recording available under a creative commons (we default to no commercial reuse) or other open source license.

Submit Your Talk

Fill out our talk proposal form: https://bit.ly/jsconfeu-2015-cfp