Call for talk proposals
Our call for talk proposals is now closed. Thank you for all of your wonderful submissions!
Hi! !!Con is back for our fifth year of celebrating the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing, and we want you to submit a talk proposal. The submission deadline is Sunday, March 4.
Over the last four years, !!Con talks have featured everything from glowing mushrooms to game theory; from machine knitting to neural networks; from live coding on an Apple II to queer feminist cyberpunk manifestos. We’ve had speakers who are programmers, poets, scientists, students, and more!
What’s an idea that delights you? Did you learn something surprising recently? Is there a tool you love that you’ve been telling everyone about? Did you do something with computers that seems impossible or amazing or just really fun? Please take this call for talk proposals as an invitation to meditate on what you find exciting and surprising and delightful about programming and computing, and then submit a talk about one of those things!
The only requirements are that your talk:
- be computing-related!
- be about something you think is interesting and cool!
- have at least one exclamation mark in the title!
We would especially like to hear from you if:
- you submitted a talk proposal in 2014-2017 that was rejected (we’ve had to reject so many talk proposals we loved).
- you’ve never spoken at a tech conference. Some of our favorite !!Con talks have been from first-time speakers.
- you find that people like you are underrepresented at programming conferences. We’re committed to doing work to make !!Con a good experience for you. See our code of conduct.
All talks will be ten minutes long. Ten minutes isn’t much time, so think carefully about the scope of your talk and be clear in the timeline about how you plan to spend the time. A single, focused idea is best – go for “here’s my favorite assembly instruction” rather than “here’s an overview of how assembly works”.
The submission deadline is Sunday, March 4. We’ll accept as many of your amazing talks as we can. You can submit more than one talk proposal.
Proposals will be anonymized to avoid bias. Although we ask for your name, email address, and so on in the proposal submission form, only one or two organizers who serve as anonymizers will actually see this information, and they won’t review your proposal. The rest of the organizing team will review your proposal without knowing who you are.
Important dates
- February 3: Call for talk proposals opens.
- March 4: Talk proposal submission deadline.
- March 18: Notification of talk acceptance.
- March 25: Deadline for speakers to confirm their participation.
- April 5: Conference registration opens.
- April 6: Public announcement of full speaker list.
- April 24: Public announcement of detailed schedule.
- May 12-13: !!Con!
Speaker travel funding
!!Con will be held at the AppNexus headquarters in Manhattan, NYC. We offer financial assistance for travel expenses (stuff like flights, trains, lodging, and meals while traveling) for outside-of-NYC speakers. If you’re not from the NYC area and you want to request funding, please fill out the relevant section of the proposal submission form.
Because submissions are reviewed anonymously, requesting financial assistance will not affect a proposal’s chances of acceptance.
New in 2018: In the past, we reimbursed our speakers for travel expenses after the conference. In some cases, we took far too long to reimburse speakers. This year we’re committing to doing better. We will pay for travel before the conference for all outside-of-NYC speakers who request it. Contact us if you have questions about how this will work!
Speaker honorarium
Preparing an amazing conference talk is hard work. To show our appreciation, we’re paying all our speakers a $256 (US) honorarium.
A note about travel
We welcome all speakers, regardless of nationality. We generally expect that accepted speakers who confirm their participation will travel to New York to present their talk in person. However, if any accepted speaker anticipates visa-related difficulties in traveling to the conference, we will make arrangements to enable remote participation, and not require them to attend the conference in order to present their talk. In such a case contact us for further guidance.
Thanks for submitting to !!Con!