Speaker best practices
- Make the title informative and persuasive (details below)
- Add sufficient detail to the description (details below)
- Add a two minute video about the talk
- Add slides if you have them ready
- Keep the code of conduct in mind
- Don't let the talk look promotional (details below)
Title is going to be the one line elevator pitch for your talk. This is going to be your first impression for both selection committee and audience. Your title will be listed with hundreds of proposals from various speakers when selection committee goes through them, even though selection doesn't solely depend on the title of the talk but remember, first impression is the best impression. Your title will be also listed along with all the talks on the conference day for the audience to go through. They are going to decide which track to attend based on your title.
The talk title can be straightforward/precise or descriptive. Examples -
"Meta classes: a deep dive" - straightforward "Lessons learnt while scaling Django + Postgresql infrastructure" - descriptive
Keep your description elaborate. It should state the problem, how you are trying to solve the problem and what are the take away for the audience. Remember, description is the part where you can convince the selection team that you know what you are talking about.
Also, to make your proposal even more better you can add an outline section at end of the description. Outline should list out the topics you cover in the talk and roughly how much time you are going to take to deliver them.
The more details you add to your proposal, you will bring more clarity to the selection committee. People prefer clarity over back and forth. So if you have your slides ready, don't hesitate to attach them to the proposal. It need not be complete, just a skeleton would also do.
You can try to take a casual 2 minute video if possible and link it to the proposal. This will showcase your presentation style and the increases the odds of your proposal getting selected.
The talk content should not look promotional. If you're talking about a commercialized project (including open source), make it sufficiently generic. Cover the alternatives, and the flip-sides too. Make the language neutral and objective.
For example, instead of - 'Simplified infrastructure using AWS Lambda', try something like 'Infrastructure using function as a service, a comparative study across AWS, Azure and GCP'
