As our CfP goes into its second half, we’re ready to announce speaker mentors – they provide help and advice if you’re not sure what to submit to DjangoCon Europe.

Content

While DjangoCon Europe has much more to offer than just talks, the talks are still the core of the conference, around which everything else is built. To make DjangoCon Europe talks great for every attendee, we’ll try to have some interesting talks for everyone – and the best thing you can do to help is to submit your talk!

You’re not sure what you could talk about? Consider these ideas (and keep in mind that this list is far from exhaustive):

• Have you recently solved a problem at work or school that required learning a new technology? Tell us what you learned!
• Have you launched something that went really well? Write a case study! Even better – did it go really badly? Tell us how to avoid the mistakes you made!
• Do you have detailed knowledge about a non-computing area (say, music, or art, or history)? Are there stories from those communities about project management, communicating, or anything else that the Django community would benefit from learning about?
• Do you belong to a particular cultural, cosial, or langauge grop that causes you problems when interacting with technology? Give us the “what everyone in tech should know about X” talk!
• Is there something unexpected you made Django do, or an uncommon bug you ran into, hunted, reported and fixed? Or is there another little known process within Django or the Django community you ran into? Tell us about your experiences!

Community

Because we’re not just looking for any old tech talk – we’re looking for talks from, by, and about our community. No issue relating to Django and the Django community is too big or too small to warrant a talk slot, open slots permitting.

Now, we know that submitting a talk can be nerve-wracking even for experienced speakers, and even more so to people who are inexperienced. Since we want to invite everybody to feel comfortable to submit talks, we’d like to introduce our speaker mentors – wonderful people who are experienced speakers, and who’ll be happy to offer help and advice regarding your talks. They can help you to formulate a vague idea, or be a sounding board on the best direction you could develop a talk that’s already half way done.

• Katie has spoken about emoji, JavaScript, security, and being nice to people, in half a dozen countries.
• Russell has spoken (rapidly) about various Python and Django projects, as well as his personal experience in tech, and is a serial DjangoCon visitor.
• Tom has spoken about API design, Django REST Framework and sustainable open source development.

Don’t hesitate to contact them if you aren’t quite ready to submit your DjangoCon Europe talk – or, if you’d like to be a speaker mentor yourself, contact us!