elm-conf 2018 will take place on September 26, 2018 in St. Louis, MO
The quick facts:
All talks submitted through the call for speakers will be 30 minutes long. Talks will be recorded, but you will have the final say before we publish.
Successful proposals tend to fall in one of these groups:
Case Studies: How do you use Elm at work? For clients? As a part of your larger open-source project?
Personal Projects: What are you working on that excites you?
Multidisciplinary: Have you done something cool with Elm and graphics? Music? Hardware?
Teaching: Have you thought of a fun way to teach a concept? What mistake did you keep making until you learned X? What could people do if they just knew about Y?
That said, the best elm-conf talks are a mix of practical and philosophical, and we'll be happy to see any proposal that tells us both what and why. These categories are provided to help you brainstorm and are not a closed list of what we'll accept. If you have an idea that falls outside what's specified here, send it in anyway! We love being surprised!
A special note for maintainers: we welcome talks about your particular corner of the Elm ecosystem and the plans you have for your packages. See the note under "Anonymity" at the bottom of this page.
However, elm-conf talk submissions should not be speculative about what other people might do, and should not specifically pressure anyone to change direction or prioritization. The one-way nature of the elm-conf stage makes it unsuitable for debate. If you have suggestions for what the language and ecosystem might do in the future, Discourse and the Elm Slack are more appropriate venues.
In addition, we probably won't accept:
A conference can't happen without speakers, so we want to do right by you. If we accept your proposal, we'll:
We also want to make sure we're representing you well, so you will get the final say on your bio, photo, and the eventual publication of your talk. (Although all talks will be recorded, we can and have declined to publish recordings in the past. Publication is always opt-in.)
If you're a first time conference speaker, you still have a really good shot of getting in. Our community gets stronger the more new and diverse voices there are, so we want to hear from you! In fact, we are reserving several slots for first-time speakers.
If you are comfortable being identified as a new speaker for the purposes of the call for speakers, please indicate that in the First time speaker field on your proposal. This is not required if you don't want to be identified in this way.
Once accepted, we will help you give your first conference talk. This includes talk structure, practice sessions, and access to more experienced speakers to talk about about what works well.
You will also be invited to the speaker dinner. We encourage you to attend this; it's a nice time to get to know your fellow speakers better.
We will also make sure you get a chance to become familiar with the venue before the audience is there—this helps calm jitters more than you'd think!
If you are new to writing conference proposals and would like to work with a speaker from a prior elm-conf to get feedback prior to submitting, please email us or contact @brianhicks or @luke on the Elm Slack (sign up here.) We'll be happy to pair you with a previous year's speaker or answer any questions you have about the process.
The first pass of talk evaluation is done anonymously by a group of Elm community members and external observers. We do this to give everyone the fairest shot possible at being accepted, and to avoid picking the same speakers every year. We've had a lot of success with this; it's given us a nice mix of veteran and first-time speakers on tons of great topics over the years.
That said, we recognize that any process involving humans will be imperfect. The Elm community is fairly small and sometimes it's impossible to avoid putting identifying information in a proposal. If you find yourself in that situation, focus on making a high-quality proposal over an anonymized one. We lean on the committee members outside the Elm community here; they can give these proposals the fairest shot.