Recently, I reviewed ~150 submissions for a conference. It’s been a while since I did a CfP review, and here are some things I noticed. Noting this is my own personal experience – others may disagree!
This was an anonymous review, which was interesting. There are a lot of great reasons to do an anonymous review, but if you’ve submitted to one you need to consider that your bio can be critical information about the talk you plan to give.
- For instance, if your workplace is in your bio, so maybe you don’t mention it in your abstract – but a brand name company implies things about scale and impact that can’t necessarily be inferred without it.
- If you can’t expect people to know who you are, you need to include more detail in your abstract about the actual content of the talk and the frame of reference it comes from – these things are often implied by a bio, and without them I find it hard to evaluate. Many topics will succeed or fail based on the credibility of the person delivering them.
- Send your submission to a friend to make sure it’s coherent before you submit it – and specifically ask the question “if you didn’t know me, would you still want to listen to this talk?”
Other observations and suggestions:
- Think critically about what other people will take away from your talk. Why should they want to listen to it? What can they expect to gain from it?
- Many people want to speak about their own experience, but it’s more useful to blend some (hard won) experience with a structure or framework that other people can take away and use to shape their own thinking.
- Make sure you’re clear about why the problem you’re talking about is real, and not remedial. Again, numbers are helpful here, for instance “How we scaled our database” is potentially interesting as talk about some genuinely unexpected problem that occurs with a certain volume, not as talk about a basic problem that occurs writing bad SQL. Call me a cynic, but as a reviewer I cannot know which one you plan to give unless you make it clear.
- I was surprised how many AI talks seemed genuinely useful and applicable. But of course AI was a buzzword, and too many buzzwords make a talk proposal unreadable. If you’re hitting a hot topic, you need to work harder to make it clear why your talk is a) actually useful and b) based on actual knowledge rather than theory.