How Did We Select Speakers for DevFest CZ?
[TL;DR: It was hard. Buy a ticket and meet the speakers IRL! :)]
Have you ever wondered how community-driven conferences choose their speakers? How do they know who is a good speaker, who has a good story to tell or who is the expert adored by everyone? And how are they able to say no even to superstars? Well, it’s freaking hard. I want to share the process we have used for DevFest CZ 2017 with you. Believe me, it wasn’t a piece of cake, it was the whole bakery business.
This year we didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so we started early. First of all, we had to ask ourselves an important question — who do we want to speak at our event? As DevFest CZ organizers are a group of people with strong opinions, our visions and preferences differed tremendously. Solution? Google Sheets with a list of desired speakers and a lot of discussions.
The speakers' committee
DevFest CZ has a decent number of core organizers, but only four of us were allocated and responsible for choosing the speakers. Although we are all nerds who have known each other for a long time, I dare to say we are a diverse group, capable of objective arguments. That said, our first task early this year was to come up with names (a LOT of names) of potential speakers who we wanted to invite. If you are familiar with IT conferences, you might be aware that some speakers are booked a year or even a year and a half in advance. This was a race with time and we didn’t mean to lose.
Three kinds of speakers
Our list of wanted speakers was very long, maybe too long :) We needed a strategy on how to reach out to people and in what order. It would not be possible for one organizer to contact every single person because this is not our day-to-day job. DevFest CZ is driven by pure passion, hype and volunteering activities and you don’t want to exhaust the crew members by sending tons of emails. The strategy had to start with some basic milestones, so we came up with three categories of speakers.
We felt very brave and optimistic about everyone, even though we were very aware that some of these celebrities wouldn’t even notice our email/tweet/video. These are too much of a superstar material, but we just had to give it a go. And you are guessing right, I’m talking about people like Elon Musk. The first category was called “INSANITY”, which basically means the chances of getting a speaker like this is somewhere between 0.0000001% and zero. But you never know when Elon would come across your tweet! We had to try it. Following Elon were our old friends Zuck and Bill G., Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Ashton Kutcher, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others. Yes, we were reaching for the stars. Literally.
Unfortunately, everyone listed above was busy with changing the world, but I am sure we will get lucky next year :)
The second category was called “POSSIBILITY”. It consisted of people who were also world-known superstars, but there was a feeling we could actually have a significant chance of getting them to our event. And we were lucky, some people named in this list filled out the CfP and are heading to our DevFest. Yay!
The third and actually the longest list was “WE LIKE THEM, THEY LIKE US”. It is pretty self-explanatory. Speakers that we have already met, the big names from IT industry, Google Developer Experts, our geeky friends and colleagues, simply people who are very interesting and successful in the jobs they do. Yep, we love them all, they will make DevFest CZ a-ma-zing.
Use of carrier pigeons?
Not a very smart solution in these days, since they would get exhausted by flying over the ocean. At the very beginning, we needed to find a way how to address all these potential speakers. Many of them don’t have public emails, so we needed to find a way to contact them through other channels — social networks like Twitter and Facebook, their personal websites, personal assistants, through their startups or companies. Every single contact was preceded by deep research. And of course, we didn’t want to write just a “be our speaker” message. We cooperated with very talented filmmakers who shot an invitation video for both speakers and attendees. This was our cool invitation!
Call for Proposals
And here we go — Call for Proposals (or Papers, if you wish). The first gathering of important information from potential speakers. Our Google form had six pages. Yes, it seems a lot but in the end, it’s not even enough. You need to gather as much information from people as possible and try not to bore them to death before even applying. A decent number of appropriate emojis in the description is ok, as it helps to understand all the rules, suggestions, deadlines, guidelines. We like emojis. Deal with it. :)
In the first wave, we were sending CfP invitations directly to potential speakers from our list. The second wave was publicly shared. Not only we used our standard channels such as our NGO newsletter, social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — but we have also been featured in SpeakerHub and in the Technically Speaking newsletter. We were also mentioned in a couple of local internet magazines. All of these had a great impact.
The results of our work were great. We received many proposals in the first round, but man… when we made the CfP public, the storm came. We ended up with more than 120 proposals and received a few more emails after the deadline (which, unfortunately, couldn’t be accepted for objective reasons, sorry guys). The submissions were very diverse, one speaker better than the other, hot topics, cool ideas, famous companies… We knew it was going to be hard to choose only a small fraction of people. I’m not going to name speakers, but at least a couple of them represented companies — Google, Uber, Adobe, Avast, TomTom, Mozilla, BBC, GOG.com, and many more. On the one hand, this is super exciting, on the other the decision-making process is much harder. There’s a lot at stake — some speakers are willing to travel across the globe for your event, so you better make sure their topic fits with your event.
Ranking process
Here, we get to the most difficult part of the selection process. How? How do we know who matches our requirements for a DevFest CZ speaker? How do we know what the most interesting topics are? Questions, questions everywhere. This is the time when our group of Fantastic Four comes united again. We came up with a ranking system and each submission was rated within five different categories and each category was rated 1–10. The categories were as follows:
- Google — as we are an event focused mainly (not fully though) on Google technologies, the first aspect had to be how much the topic is relevant to DevFest spirit, extending this year’s I/O hot topics or based on Google flagships.
- Presentation skills — there’s not much to explain. We asked for any kind of reference, like a video of the past talks, a list of conferences attended as a speaker, other speaker’s reference etc. We are beginner-friendly, but we have our standards. We’ve also offered help with preparation of the talk/workshop and some people gladly accepted.
- Diversity — this is a big topic among IT conferences. This category celebrates diversity in a bigger picture. Not only whether the speaker is a female, but also whether they are from an underrepresented group like LGBTQ, people with disabilities, exotic countries or nations, or if the speaker had a co-speaker.
- Star quality — whether the speaker is famous in their field of expertise, developer superstar or somebody who is hard to get at other conferences. Basically anything you can think of under the definition of a “star”.
- Relevance and attractiveness of the topic — the most important category. Every one of us rated this category subjectively, but in the end, we followed the same direction. Many submissions were made by amazing people with great presentation skills, great background, but with topics either too general or too specific, duplicate to other topics or conferences, or just completely out of the DevFest CZ range of interest. They didn’t make the cut, but those who did are really great.
I have to mention our speakers' committee once again. To sustain objective decisions, every one of us rated the submissions separately and then we summed up all the numbers together. We didn’t calculate an average score, just kept the real numbers there. Actually, most of the submissions were rated similarly, which was very interesting and assured us that the quality of the talks is super high.
After ranking all the submissions we did the fair cut. We had to draw the line, not for a specific result, but the number of time slots for speakers. This was very difficult, as many of the speakers’ scores differed for example by one or two points. The competition was very tough.
The results
All the submissions were great. I have to state this one more time. We didn’t expect this many CfPs in the first place. And I have to say this for the whole DevFest CZ organisation team, we feel truly honoured by the desire to speak at our event.
Now, I guess you are curious who actually made the cut and want to know who our great speakers are. Look at the list! An incredible group of people, right? Then grab your ticket now and see you at DevFest CZ in Prague in November!
