{"id":65,"date":"2026-09-04T10:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T10:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/2026\/09\/04\/talk-proposals-close-on-31-october\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T10:20:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T10:20:00","slug":"talk-proposals-close-on-31-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/2026\/09\/04\/talk-proposals-close-on-31-october\/","title":{"rendered":"Talk proposals close on 31 October"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Proposals for the 2027 programme are open until the end of October. Four speakers are already announced; the other twelve slots are decided from what arrives in the next eight weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you have been thinking about it and talking yourself out of it, this post is aimed at you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What to send<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two paragraphs. The first says what the talk is about. The second says why you are the person giving it, which can be as simple as &#8220;I did this and it went badly for eight months&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is the whole submission. We do not want slides, an abstract in a particular format, a biography in the third person, or a video of you speaking somewhere else. We have read enough conference submission forms to know that they mostly filter for people who enjoy filling in forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A title helps, even a rough one. If you cannot write a title you probably have a subject rather than a talk, and we would rather help you find the talk inside it than say no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What we are looking for<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talks about work that actually happened. The programme is built around things that outlast the team that built them, which in practice means:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Systems you have lived with for years, and what the fifth year taught you that the first did not.<\/li>\n\n\n<li>Decisions that turned out badly, honestly described. Two of this year&#8217;s talks are about failures, at our request, and they are the ones people quote afterwards.<\/li>\n\n\n<li>The unglamorous parts: testing, on-call, hiring, documentation, migrations that took eighteen months.<\/li>\n\n\n<li>Work from outside the usual shapes. Local government, hospitals, logistics, agriculture. A well-told talk about scheduling farm machinery beats a fashionable talk about scale.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We are not looking for product pitches. There are no sponsor keynotes and there never will be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Half the line-up is held for first-timers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is deliberate and it is the part of the programme we are proudest of. Half of the sixteen slots go to people who have not given a conference talk before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If that is you, say so in your proposal. It helps rather than hurts. Every first-time speaker gets a session with one of us in the new year, a read-through of the talk about a month before, and a rehearsal in the room on the morning if you want one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Speakers do not pay for a ticket, and we cover travel and a night&#8217;s accommodation for anyone who needs it. Ask; nobody has ever been turned down for asking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What happens next<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every proposal gets a written answer from a person, not a form email. We aim to have all of them out by the end of November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The full line-up is announced in February, once everyone has said yes in writing, and the grid goes out about a month before the conference itself, which is on 14 and 15 May at The Assembly Rooms in Bristol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Talks are twenty or forty minutes. If your idea is really a workshop, say so, and we will talk about the afternoon rooms instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">If you are not sure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Send the two paragraphs anyway. The worst outcome is a short, friendly no from someone who read it properly. The most common thing we hear from speakers afterwards is that they nearly did not send it, which is a strange thing for a programme to be built on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Proposals go to the address on the contact page, by the end of 31 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two paragraphs, no slides, no video of you speaking. Twelve of the sixteen talks are still open, half the line-up is held for people who have never given a conference talk, and every proposal gets a written answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":64,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}