We know submitting a proposal to a conference can be intimidating, especially for newer speakers. We want to help support you, so you feel comfortable submitting a talk to Open Source Bridge. To that end, we’ve put together some office hours and resources to help.
Video Office Hours
The video-based office hours will be hosted via Google Hangouts. The goal of these office hours is to help people who would like some face-to-face support and real time discussion. These office hours are good for things like brainstorming a topic or encouraging someone who isn’t sure if they should submit a talk.
If you already have a talk idea and want feedback on your proposal, you should check out the text office hours. Google Hangouts have a limit of 10 participants, so at most 9 potential speakers will be able to participate at any given time.
Text Office Hours
The text-based office hours will be hosted on the ##osbridge-proposal-help IRC channel on freenode. The goal of these office hours is to help people who would like feedback on their talk proposal(s). You can share your proposal(s) and questions with our hosts via text (e.g. email, gist, pastebin, google doc), and they will review and do their best to answer your questions and provide feedback.
Not sure how to use IRC? That’s totally ok! There is a web client you can use in your browser by going here. The only setup necessary is giving it a user name to identify yourself. If this doesn’t work for you, please send us an email with information about your proposal, and we’ll work on getting you feedback via email.
Below are the currently scheduled office hours. If these don’t work for you, be sure to check back. We’re in the process of confirming more times and will add more very soon.
- Monday, April 11th 6-7pm PDT (UTC-7)
- Tuesday, April 12th 8-9am PDT (UTC-7)
- Tuesday, April 12th 12-3pm PDT (UTC-7)
- Tuesday, April 12th 7-8pm PDT (UTC-7)
- Wednesday, April 13th 2-3pm PDT (UTC-7)
- Wednesday, April 13th 6-9pm PDT (UTC-7)
Quick Tips
Here are some quick tips from organizers and past speakers to help you get started.
- This is a great conference for first time speakers. Don’t discount yourself ahead of time. Leave it to the organizers to select the talks for the conference.
- Make it clear what your talk is about and what the audience will get out of it. This is helpful for people reviewing your talk and for conference attendees if your talk is selected.
- Keep the time slot in mind when scoping your talk. If your topic could fit well in multiple time slots, let us know in the “note to organizers” section, so we can keep that in mind during selection.
- If you have more than one thing you want to talk about, please submit multiple proposals. If more than one talk is selected, we will check in and give you the option to pick your favorite talk or to give both. If you know ahead of time you only want to give one talk, feel free let us know in the “note to organizers” section. This will not impact whether your talk(s) get selected or not.
Take a look at sessions from previous years for examples of proposals that were accepted.
Additional Resources
Want even more help? Check out these resources about developing talks from past Open Source Bridge speakers.