Call for talk proposals

Hi!

!!Con is back for our seventh 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 1.

Since its launch in 2014, !!Con talks have featured everything from glowing mushrooms to game theory; from machine knitting to geolocation; 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 love about 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!

What do we mean by talk* with an asterisk? Last year we expanded what we consider for !!Con’s 10-minute slots! Send us plays about the joy of computing, musical numbers about a bug you found, a magic show using strace. Whatever you want to do with a ten-minute slot, we’d love to hear about it. Of course, we’re looking forward to seeing good old-fashioned talk proposals as well.

We would especially like to hear from you if:

you submitted a talk proposal in 2014-2019 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 1. We’ll accept as many amazing talks* as we can. You can submit more than one 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.

Submit your proposal today!

Important dates:

February 10: Call for talk* proposals opens.
March 1: Talk* proposal submission deadline.
March 15: Notification of talk* acceptance.
March 22: Deadline for speakers to confirm their participation.
March 25: Conference registration opens.
April 5: Public announcement of full speaker list.
April 26: Public announcement of detailed schedule.
May 9-10: !!Con!

Speaker travel funding

!!Con will be held in 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.

Speaker honorarium

Preparing an amazing conference talk is hard work. To show our appreciation, we’re paying all our speakers a $256 (US) honorarium.

Accessibility

!!Con is committed to being an conference available to everyone. The conference hall and stage are fully wheelchair accessible. Speakers are encouraged to use their own computers to present, although we’ll also have spares on hand. We also do our best to make the conference as accessible as possible for our attendees in a variety of ways (stenography, gender-neutral restrooms, quiet spaces, etc). Please don’t hesitate to let us know, if your talk is accepted, what we can do to make your speaking arrangement comfortable.

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.

You can submit your talk* by using this form. Thanks for submitting to !!Con!