Call for Presentations

“JSConf EU — This is your conference.”

We are inviting the JavaScript community to submit talks for the upcoming JSConf EU (October 6th-7th, Berlin). This Call for Presentation closes on July 15th.

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).

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.
• Crazy Ideas & Crazy Hacks.
• Improving JavaScript developers’ lives.
• Mobile JS.
• Embedded JS.
• Hardware JS.
• Fundamentals, in a modern light.
• The JavaScript community, history, past, present & future.
• 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 reach out and 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.

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 fancy hotel near the venue (including free Wifi) for the days of the conference and a day before and after (i.e. October 5th-8th). If you want to stay longer, we can arrange things, just let us know. You will have to cover extra nights, though. Note: Pay attention to the JSConf EU Week Calendar for satellite events you don’t want to miss.

  • 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 going to Fronteers as well), 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 submitter.
• Two rounds of voting:
  • The first round rates each talk on a scale from 1 to 10.
  • 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.

Example Submission

Here’s a proposal that we accepted in 2011:

How To Be Better

You’re read the Definitive Guide and flicked through the standard, you know how to assign default values with OR and you go to your local usergroup once in a while.

How do you move your JS skills along and upwards on the unstoppable path of true mastery? Do you want to be one of those folks who dismisses wtfjs.com with a sniff, a wave of the hand and an offhand comment of “call recasts the parameter as an object”?

From the blindingly obvious (write more javascript) - through the positively heretical (never ever use JSLint - except when it’s a really good idea) - to the bizarre (take up needlework), come and be guided toward the bright shiny light where the gods live.

Guidelines

Submit your proposal by July 15th, 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). That includes 3-5 minutes of Q&A. We will be on a tight schedule and enforce the end of a talk rigorously. 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 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.

We do this for the benefit of the larger JS 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 in any way, 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