The Call for Speakers for PowerShell Conference Europe is now open until the 16th of December 2022!
This year again we will select around 40 speakers to present two sessions relevant to PowerShell practitioners.
If you’ve never been to PSConfEU, check our PSConfEU 2022 after movie and the recordings!
In this post we’ll try to answer the most common questions you may have, but if anything is missing, feel free to contact us!
Speaker Mentorship
This year we’re launching a mentorship program for those who’d like some extra help with their session submissions, and if selected, with preparing and rehearsing their presentations.
How does that work?
Click on the picture to access the form and register, it takes 2 minutes. We’ll contact you with further details soon!
We’ll chat with you and give you some tips such as: what organisers might be looking for in a session abstract, how to submit, and what to expect of the process.
Then we’ll assist with your creation process where an experienced speaker will review your first draft and give you some pointers. Finally when you’ve created your abstracts we’ll help with the “how to create the presentation”.
Benefits
PowerShell Conference Europe is only as good as its speakers and their content! We depend on the great effort they put into their sessions and we love to see them sharing their knowledge with the community.
Although we are not able to pay speaking fees, we offer the following compensation:
- Contribution to the hotel accomodation (equivalent to 50% of the room from Sunday to Thursday)
- Full access to the conference, social events, and the traditional PSConfEU Mug
- Speaker SWAG
- Speaker’s dinner
We know, it is still an important cost easier for certain demographic, so we’re ready to consider helping a bit more those from underrepresented groups, just reach out!
For instance, if you’re travelling with a child under the age of 3, your hotel room will be covered by us on a double occupancy + baby basis.
While we focus on an in-person conference, we always do our best to record the sessions and make them available publicly, although every year some technical glitches get in the way, which means we can’t guarantee it.
Session Topics
We’re pretty open-minded about the topics as long as it sounds helpful and interesting to our audience of PowerShell practitioners. At the end of the day, the community thrives when its members have fun and are successful in their job and career.
Each year we ask the community what content they would like to see at next PSConfEU, and we share those findings on social media (whatch this space for 2023, it’s beyond the scope of this post).
To clarify, it’s not “just” about PowerShell, but it usually has to be relatable to PowerShell professionals.
Non-technical skills, mental health, practices, methodologies, tools, or other technologies that must not be missed for PowerShell folks are all great candidates. We’d consider talks about why another language is more appropriate than PowerShell for a given task, like how Bicep is for defining Azure infrastructure as code. The key for such submissions is to have the abstract relatable to the potential PSConfEU participants.
Obviously, it’s well known that many attendees come for deep technical content, but we also want sessions packed with the fundamentals of the language, even if it has been covered in previous years. There always are participants relatively new on their PowerShell journey, and those interested in a quick refresher.
Don’t be fooled though, fundamentals might be challenging to present with clarity. Completely original projects or approaches might be easier to get selected as they won’t compete with similar submissions. A lot of the session selection also look at the overall conference, to make sure we the content is coherent and do not overlap too much, that’s why it’s so much work for the selection committee!
Session Length
Over the years, we found that 45min including Q&A worked best for most sessions and the 15min break between sessions was required for participants to recharge between talks, or follow up with the speaker. It does require the presenters to get quickly into their subject, without spending too much time in background information or context.
Attendees want to see demos, code, solutions, examples, then hear the explanations!
We recomend you prepare about 30 minutes of the main content, after which you pause for Q&A for up to 15 min.
Make sure you have some extra demos ready to show, in case there are no questions. Even better, have them recorded and we can share them even if you don’t have time to present them.
NEW: Follow-along sessions
This year we’d like to have submissions for “follow-along sessions”.
Those are 90 minutes hands-on sessions designed so that the attendees can reproduce what is presented. It’s not a workshop because there might be over a hundred attendees in the room, but there will be tables and people with their laptop.
Those thessions will be 45min, the 15min coffee break, and another 45min.
It is the attendees’ choice to do the hands-on part, but they may prefer to just follow your presentation, or team up with whoever is next to them.
Timeline
While the call for speakers is open until the 16th of December, it’s best to submit early! We might review sessions and announce speakers before this date. If you want early feedback and support with your submissions, register for the mentorship program and we’ll get in touch. If you register too late, we might be too busy to follow up.
By the 5th of January we will have notified each session whether it has been accepted or rejected. We’ll then ask the speakers to confirm their commitment as soon as possible. Once confirmed, we will start announcing the speakers and adding them to the schedule.
From there, as we get closer to the conference we will register your speaker ticket, help you book your hotel, and keep you informed.
Questions?
For furter questions, related or not to the Call for Speakers, feel free to email us at: contact {at} psconf.eu!
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