DISCLAIMER: This year, we collected a series of suggestions to support aspiring wannabe speakers at the next PyCon Italia. We do not want to impose any rules, but we hope this will help you increase your proposals' acceptance rate.
Writing abstracts is hard. Writing good abstracts is even more challenging. So write your abstract as if the person reading it will make a decision on the basis of a very quick reading. Stay focused on your topic and make clear from the very beginning what your goal is and what your intentions are for your talk. Last but not least, make your proposal appealing and unique.
Remember:
Once accepted, your talk abstract will likely be published in the conference program. So don’t make your presentation very different from what you included in the abstract so that the expectations of attendees can be met.
Below are some common pitfalls and suggestions on how to face CFP writing.
Step 6 is incredibly valuable, no matter where you are in the process. Try to get feedback from a variety of people, including some who have spoken at the conference(s) you’re planning to submit to. They can help guide you about style and advice specific to those events.
The title of your talk. Try to find something catchy that gets people interested.
Shorter is better. (Aim for 15 words more or less)
Who the intended audience for your talk is and what kind of skill levels they should have e.g “Intermediate to advanced Python devs” or “Beginning Django Web Developers”. Just a quick description of your audience that shows you’re thinking about their needs.
A short teaser: ~400 characters
Not a high level teaser but a brief TL;DR — What’s going to be the intro, progression, and payoff.
What question will this talk answer? Why is this important information? (Aim for 100–200 words here.)
at the end of the training, you will be able to … (eg: create a python module with proper tests)
no knowledge, basic Python knowledge, deep understanding of JIT internals…
the training will be done with jupyter notebook, students will work in groups to cooperate, …
- intro & setup environment: 30m
- decide 2 features: 30m
- break: 10m
- writing tests: 30m
- writing code: 20m
- break: 10m
- improve performance of …: 30m
- peer-review: 20m
Here 3 successes and 3 failures proposals in different PyCon (US) editions. Just to give you an idea.
We hope that with this post we will help you write better proposals and thus to make PyCon Italia even better!