Crafting CFPs that strike a chord: Conferences are cool, speaking at them is cooler

Although I am still not cool enough (better word: experienced) to claim that ‘keynote speaker’ is my middle name, all I can say through the little understanding that I have gathered by speaking at a handful of conferences like Google’s Devfest India or Major League Hacking’s Hackcon is that conferences are really cool, but getting a chance to speak at them is unimaginably cooler. When I say cool, I’m not just speaking about all the speaker drip and the headshots with a mic that soon make it to one’s LinkedIn profiles. From ‘cool’ here, I refer to all the exposure, career opportunities, and networking prospects that come one’s way by sharing their experiences and learnings on reputed global platforms. (and maybe also the cool speaker schwag :D)

The best part is that you neither need to be a subject matter expert nor an orator as influential as Hitler to get your first breakthrough as a spokesperson at a conference. At least I wasn’t any of the two when I began this journey.

It all starts with a CFP 🗒️

Almost any conference you wish to speak at requires you to submit a CFP (Call for Proposals or Call for Papers) within a stipulated window. A CFP demands that you must have a rough idea (usually called abstract) of what you wish to speak about. Usually, the abstract required is no more than a paragraph long as the organizers seek just the gist of your idea. CFP forms are usually accompanied by questions revolving along the lines of why you are the best person to give the particular talk you submitted a proposal for. Other details sought are the applicant’s bio and social media handles (Twitter and LinkedIn FTW; for tech-centric talks, GitHub reigns supreme too).

Having a concrete outline of what you will be speaking about in some conference that lies 2–6 months ahead is neither ideal nor expected. Just having a rough idea suffices provided you craft it amazingly in your proposal and feel capable of doing so in your final talk as well. There is a reason here why the abstract is called ‘abstract’ and why giving intricate details about your talk isn’t considered an optimum move because believe it or not, your opinions, thoughts, and ideas regarding a particular topic are bound to evolve in the time span between the proposal submission and the conference day.

Storytelling FTW! 🎤

Jargon is great but there is a reason people will be attending your talk rather than spending their time reading Wikipedia articles on the topic you are speaking about. To write interesting and unique CFPs, the best approach is to adopt narratives that are derived from personal experiences. This approach not only holds true for the CFP but can also be used while curating your keynote. Here’s an example to understand this better:

Let’s say you are delivering a beginner-friendly talk revolving along the lines of the ‘best game development engine for amateurs’. Rather than beginning your proposal with a conventional ‘I will be speaking about the best game development engine that can be used by beginners to create their very own games….’, narrate in a line or two, some personal experience related to the domain. Maybe talk about the feeling invoked within you when you solved a bug after a week of brainstorming on the relevant game engine and how it helped you find out that game development was your ikigai, maybe talk about how you realized XYZ game engine is beginner friendly while running mentorship cohorts for the same in your college.

Example: “I still remember relentlessly making the dinosaur jump over the cacti as an eleven-year-old child whenever there was a network outage. Little did I know that ten years down the line I would be making my own game prototypes in the XYZ game development engine which proved to be an extremely beginner-friendly software.”

This won’t just pique the initial interest of the reviewer/listener in your CFP/talk but might also lead to some point or instance of relatability. Also, since you are adopting storytelling in your proposal or talk, it becomes more inclusive because of the ease of understanding it offers and your target audience becomes bigger.

Not everything is about stories though 📕

Note that for conferences that are niche and are extremely focused on a particular tech stack, extremely informal means of storytelling might not be the right way to proceed. Technical jargon in those cases is a requirement. Not everything about ‘Kubernetes’ or ‘Building Web APIs with Flask’ can be turned into a story. If the session is being targeted at an experienced lot of folks who have been in some particular tech domain for decades, there is no problem at all to proceed with technical jargon.

Notes to Organizers 🧠

Oftentimes, there is a field in the CFP forms asking if you would like to leave a note for the organizers. While leaving this field empty won’t have any dire impact on your proposal application, filling it might lead to an upper hand. Here are a few examples of what can be written as a note to the organizers:

• If you have delivered the same talk before at some conference or spoken on some similar topic elsewhere, it is worth mentioning the same in the “Notes to Organizers” section. If the talk was virtual and you happen to have a link to the recording/live stream, sharing the same would further help. Mentioning a line or two related to how the prior response to the session has been will also accentuate the value of your proposal. 📹
• Similarly, if you have a published blog or paper already on the topic you are submitting the proposal for, adding its link is a bright move.
• If there is a niche of individuals you wish to target through the session, let’s say you aim to target only experienced Docker developers through your talk, mentioning the same in notes won’t just help the organizers better in knowing your background or classifying your session but might also save their time by appointing the right reviewer for the same. In some CFP forms, the domain of your session is additionally asked as a separate field; hence, this step is not required in those cases.
• If the question “Why are you the best person to deliver this talk?” is not asked separately in the application and if you have an answer to the same (a modest one), then mentioning the same in a line or two might prove to be a great add-on provided it embarks upon your professional experience in that particular domain.

It’s all about taking the plunge 🏊

Common thoughts that might be arising in your mind right now:

• I either see only veterans or that extremely famous tech YouTuber speaking at conferences. What are the chances my proposal would be selected over such big shots?
• I’m just a beginner in this particular tech stack/domain. Why would anyone select my proposal when there are such experienced folks working in this domain for decades?
• Where are these conferences even happening? How am I supposed to keep track of them?
• Networking, huh, I am too good at that. What else do I get out of speaking at a conference or putting in the work to submit proposals?

As I said before, the aim of these conferences is not to pick the most experienced person in a particular field and hand them the mic to utter the postulated theories or their code snippets. The intent is to find a diverse lot of people and to let them share their first-hand interpretations, experimentation and experiences with a particular tech stack or domain. Conferences and CFPs are neither about exorbitant language usage nor about being an MUNer since childhood nor about the depth of knowledge about a particular topic.

CFPs are about finding a middle ground between being a subject-matter expert yourself and helping others become one through your talk (having a decent amount of knowledge about your domain/topic of interest makes it easier to establish this common ground in my opinion).

Long story short, it’s all about taking that plunge. There’s a reason why they say people who are two steps ahead of you can teach you better than people who are miles ahead. You passing the exam by studying just a single night before from your friend and not understanding a word the professor utters during the classes is a classic example of the aforementioned statement. The initial intent before writing this blog was not to mention stuff like “‘ProWritingAid’ is an extremely useful tool when it comes to technical writing or proposal drafting.” I believe such knowledge is always just a single Google search away. The intent was to encourage more student developers, researchers, and developer evangelists to take the plunge and apply to become speakers, volunteers, facilitators, or organizers at conferences.

Coming to the question of keeping track of these conferences, there’s no one-stop destination for the same. There are multiple ways to go about this but two prominent ones are:

• Following people on Twitter who are active in the developer ecosystem as evangelists or DevRels is one way to keep track of the conferences. Following the conference page itself too will let you know of not only the CFP deadline but the entire conference structure, right from the deadline for ‘call for volunteers’ forms to the deadline for ‘call for sponsors’ forms. When it comes to opportunities, Twitter is the new LinkedIn :)
• Talk to people. Simply talking to people (especially students because they have ample time to reply to your queries as compared to working professionals) who are engaged in the conference ecosystem will help you know more about their journey and all that the process of being at a conference as a speaker or a delegate entails.

It’s a common misconception when I use the word ‘tech-conference’ that they would be extremely niche or tech-centric but that’s not true.

If you design animations or interfaces, there are global conferences for you. If you are a hackathon organizer, there are conferences for you. You write code, you manage products, you make games, you run communities, you create documentation, you contribute to open-source, for everything that you do, there are abundant global conferences.

Just dopamine? 🧪

Coming to what will you get out of the entire cumbersome process of searching for conferences and submitting proposals for them, I believe there is no objective or quantifiable answer to this. The opportunities that open up are immense, the chance to slowly build a personal brand for yourself that can be leveraged ahead in your career is paramount and the entire process right from submitting a proposal to the joy of getting a selection email to the hassle of booking your travel to the skepticism while making your presentation and then finally speaking at the day of the conference is a bliss. As a student, there will be multiple instances when your keynote day will be just a day before your exam or maybe it will collide with your exams, but that’s the fun part, right — getting to manage a whole lot of college with a conference?

The gist is that you never know how being at the right place at the right time (not in a fairy-tale way but in a career-oriented way) might get you to places which otherwise might have seemed so far-fetched your entire life. So, keep the ball rolling and keep crafting CFPs that strike a chord with the student developer community!