Guidance for entering the Call for Proposals

DeltaV is a brand new conference bringing together web performance professionals for two days of talks, discussions and networking.

We’re looking for passionate speakers to take to the stage alongside the stellar line up of speakers we have already announced. You don’t have to be well known to join our programme: we welcome submissions from individuals who consider themselves under-represented on stage at technical conferences, and from less experienced speakers. If you have an idea or experience you’d like to share with the web perf community, why not submit a proposal?

How will you be supported?

The organising team is committed to supporting speakers at all stages of their application. Here are some of the measures we take:

• If you’d like to enter our Call for Papers but want some feedback on your talk idea, application or anything else first, we encourage you to get in touch. We may be able to pair you with a community mentor who can give you some impartial advice.
• For selected talks, we are able to offer expert coaching on public speaking that can be particularly helpful for less experienced speakers, and will give you the opportunity to gain confidence and a new skill.
• Speaker travel and accommodation is funded, and we will book things and pay for them upfront to save you having to submit expenses afterwards if you prefer. We also offer an honorarium to thank you for your time.
• The night before the conference, we host a low-key speaker dinner so you can meet your fellow speakers and get to know the chair and organisers too.
• Post-conference, you’ll receive professional photos of yourself onstage, and we make videos of all the talks available for free online following the conference, with speakers of course retaining copyright.

What we’re looking for

In particular we’re looking for two kinds of sessions:

• Real life case studies where you’ve worked through and solved challenges you think your peers may share
• High level sessions on new and disruptive technologies and tools

We are aiming to have a balance of topics, but here are some themes that we think would make interesting talks:

Accessibility, UX, Architectures, web security & bots, third party governance, tooling, synthetic, RUM, load, infrastructure config testing, measuring for the business and insight, and the future direction of web performance and the internet.

Some slots will be allocated 30 minutes and others will take a 10 minute lightning talk format. You can indicate in your submission which length of talk you would prefer.

Although this is a web performance conference, not every single talk needs to be specifically about web perf. If you have a great idea for a talk that would be relevant to our audience but that’s about a different topic, submit it anyway! We keep a few slots available for “wildcards” – something that doesn’t necessarily exactly fit the description of the themes and topics above, but we feel would be interesting, inspiring or entertaining for our attendees.

And of course, you can feel free to submit more than one talk idea!

How to make your application as strong as possible

We’d like to finish up with some practical tips for writing an excellent CFP submission:

Content

We particularly favour talks that either contain practical takeaways for the audience, or take the form of a story that can inspire our attendees or help them avoid common mistakes. It’s helpful if it has fairly wide appeal, although sometimes niche talks are well received too. Above all, it must be relevant for our audience.

Talk title

For a talk title that stands out, consider the following three points:

• Give a clear idea of what the talk is about: When an attendee is skimming the schedule quickly, it helps if they can tell at a glance what the general theme of your talk is. So try include the major keyword(s).
• Jazz it up: At the same time, if you can add an element of intrigue or fun to the talk title, it’ll be much more memorable. Maybe phrase it as a question or add in a fun reference!
• Keep it snappy: Overly long talk titles can be a real pain, especially when displayed on mobile. Keep it succinct if you can.

Talk description

We use this for the website listing if your talk is selected, so write it in 3rd person and ideally keep it between 100 and 150 words. Be clear about what you’ll cover, and what the audience can expect to learn as a result.

Previous talks

It’s really helpful for us to be able to see what other talks you’ve delivered before, so if there are any videos online of you speaking, whether it’s at a huge conference or a tiny meetup, please do give us the links!

Biography

Again, we feature this on the website for selected talks. Write it in 3rd person and keep it to around 100 words. If you’ve worked on any projects that our audience might have heard of, feel free to mention these.

Send us your submission!

We hope this information is helpful for anyone considering applying to speak at DeltaV conference 2018. The Call for Proposals will close on 7 December 2017 at 17:00 GMT.

If you’d like to discuss anything related to the call for papers or your talk idea, feel free to reach out to us by email [email protected].