Technically Speaking – From Conference Proposal to Submit

Chiu-Ki and I ran out first in person Technically Speaking event at 360iDev which was super exciting. It was great to meet some of our subscribers in person and go into more depth on some of the topics we cover in the newsletter.

The topic was about putting together your first speaking proposal, and included:

• Owning your expertise
• Finding places to apply.
• Prepping an abstract.
• Writing a bio.

We really think that everyone has some expertise that they can share so for us the highlight was seeing people’s ideas develop through the session, from the vague “this might be interesting” at the beginning to strong pitches for talks we would love to see at the end.

We put together this handout with some good resources on these topics, and we’ll be exploring how to make this content more available over the next few months.

Meanwhile some of the key takeaways were:

• You have an interesting talk in you (yes you!)
• Peer mentoring can be really helpful.
• Your abstract is a short sales pitch for your talk, you don’t need to go into too much detail but you do need to explain why people want to hear it.
• Your bio should support you as being a great person to speak on that topic.

Massive thanks to our fabulous facilitators, and our inspiring attendees. We also really appreciate those who bought supporter tickets, which allows us to compensate our facilitators.