We welcome proposals from individuals of all experience levels, emphasizing the diversity of talks at PyCon APAC, from beginner-friendly to advanced topics.
Important Dates
- October 29, 2024 - Call For Proposals Opens
- December 9, 2024 - Proposal Review Process Starts. Notification of Acceptance will be rolled out in batches.
- December 15, 2024 (23:59:59 UTC+8) - Call For Proposals Ends
- January 12, 2024 - All review decisions should be sent at this time
- March 1-2, 2025 - PyCon APAC 2025 at Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, PH
Proposing a Talk
We embrace many talk topics that revolve around Python and the Python community. Our standard talk durations are set at 30 minutes including question and answer.
Proposing a Workshop
You may expect to have workshop participants ranging from 30-70 people. Workshops are typically scheduled for 2-3 hours, ensuring ample time for comprehensive discussion. To enhance your workshop experience, dedicated volunteers will be assigned to provide support throughout the session.
Topics and Advice
What excites you about Python development or the community lately? What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting? What has been the slowest or most frustrating thing you’ve learned over the past few years, and could you put together a talk that would assist in that process for the next Pythonista who tackles the same problem?
There is no official restriction on the topic you propose for a talk session. Talks about Python or the Python community are most likely to line up with the interests of PyCon APAC’s audience, and a key consideration that the talk selection committee will be thinking about is your talk’s ability to draw an audience.
Recent articles, blog posts, tweets, and open-source projects from the community can be a good source of talk topics and ideas, as can your own experiences as a Python user.
As you consider different topics, you might be interested in reviewing the slate of talks selected to appear at PyCon APAC and PyCon PH in previous years:
Good Ideas
- Submit your proposal early. The program committee will provide feedback on talks that come into our system, and we will work with you to improve your proposal, but this is only feasible if your proposal is submitted well before the deadline.
- Be sure to answer some basic questions:
- Who is the intended audience for your talk? (Be specific; “Python programmers” is not a good answer to this question.)
- What will attendees get out of your talk? When they leave the room, what will they know that they didn’t know before?
- Your outline should be an enumeration of what you intend to say, along with time estimates.
- It is not necessary to have completely written your talk already, but you should have an idea of what the points you intend to make are and roughly how long you will spend on each one.
- Ensure that your talk will be relevant to a non-trivial set of people. If your talk is on a particular Python package or piece of software, it should be something that a significant number of people use or want to use. If your talk is about a package that you are writing, ensure that it has gained some acceptance before submitting a talk. If a tool you’re excited about is not used widely, consider shifting the focus of your talk to a related best practice or theme which will have broader applicability and a larger audience.
- Include links to source code, articles, blog posts, videos, or other resources that add context to your proposal.
- If you’ve given a talk, tutorial, or other presentation before, especially at an earlier PyCon or another conference, include that information as well as a link to slides or a video if they’re available.
Bad Ideas
- Avoid infomercials.
- That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your work or company at PyCon APAC. For instance, we welcome talks on how you or your company solved a problem or notable open source projects that may benefit attendees.
- On the other hand, talks on “how to use our product” (or similar) usually aren’t appropriate.
- Avoid presenting a proposal for code that is incomplete. The program committee is very skeptical of “conference-driven development”.
- Avoid “state of our project” talks, unless you can make a compelling argument that the talk will be well-attended and that attendees will gain value from it.
- Do not assume that everyone on the Program Committee will know who you are simply because you have presented at PyCon in the past. Everyone should submit a detailed proposal. During the first round of review, we won’t even see your name on the proposals!
Selection Process
The review process starts roughly 1 month after the CFP opens. We assure you that we take our time to review and process each proposal in respect for your efforts and to ensure a meaningful experience for everyone.
Criteria
Here are the criteria that we will use to evaluate your Proposal.
- Completeness of provided information
- Did the speaker took the time to provide good information about their talk? Did it pique your interest?
- Topic variety
- If the topic category is over-submitted they will naturally score lower here -- think supply and demand. This filters out the good talks in popular categories.
- Rarity
- Another filter for quality and variety. Is the topic rarely talked about these days but can potentially have high value in the overall conference experience? (i.e. niche uses of Python)
- Speaker's experience
- Did the speaker have previous speaking experience? We want a good balance of experienced and new speakers.
- Overall impact
- What's your subjective impression of this topic? Do you think this will really add value to the conference experience?
Where to submit your proposal?
You can proceed to the Call for Proposal Form. We’ll be waiting for your submissions! 🙂
If you have any questions, feel free to email us at pyconprogram@python.ph