CFP is open for DDD Perth 2023

It’s that time of year again — the Call For Proposals for DDD Perth 2023 is on!

If you haven’t been able to get to one of our CFP Workshops, we’re here to give you some tips on how to put your best foot forward this conference season, even if you’ve never tried this before.

What Will I Talk About?

Sometimes we hear that people would love to give a talk, but “just don’t have anything worth talking about”. We’re here to bust that myth. Everyone has something they can share if they’d like — because even if a particular topic is well-known, your experience with it is brand new!

If you’re sitting there with pen or keyboard in hand, here’s some questions to get the cogs turning:

• What’s a problem that you’ve had to solve in the last 12 months? What did you need to do to solve it, and what lessons have you taken away from this?
• What’s a process or piece of tech that you want to learn more about? (Not only does your journey of discovery make a good talk, but you now have the motivation to learn something in more depth!)
• Think back to the last new framework, process, or practice that you used at work — what went well? What didn’t go so well?
• What is something that has made a big difference in your career, that you don’t think gets enough airtime in conferences or media?
• Think about both the best and worst experiences or projects you’ve had in the past year. What were the contributing factors to both, and why do you think this was?

Sit down and take 20 to brainstorm using the list above. You’ll be surprised at just how many ideas you actually have!

Writing Your Proposal

So you’ve got your ideas — fantastic! Now you need to put a proposal together that convinces people that your talk is one they need to hear. There are three key parts to a good proposal:

1. The Context: Talk about the audience that you’re aiming to reach — explain how you and they have a connection, and how they’re going to be able to relate to you.
2. The Problem: Your problem needs to be something that your audience will be able to recognise, and be drawn to hearing your thoughts on.
3. The Promise: Outline how you’ll be solving their problem, or contributing some novel thought towards one.

Now when putting this together, don’t expect to get it right straight away. You might start with something that reads a little mechanical, and that’s okay — once you have the kernel of your idea laid, switch to trying to persuade people why they should be coming along to hear about it. You also need to be considerate of your audience — if you’re going to go deep on C# performance analysis, this is probably not something to try and sell to a general audience. Likewise, you probably shouldn’t worry about trying to convince veteran UX designers to come to your “Design 101 for developers”.

Above all, just be yourself. If you’ve got passion and excitement for a topic, let that come through. A massive part of any conference talk is not the topic itself, but the person talking to it — their experiences, energy, and excitement for the subject.

Where To Next?

Once you’ve put a proposal forward for DDD, your journey doesn’t end there. Our team is on hand to provide feedback to you to help tweak things, or even supply someone to mentor or guide you through the CFP and speaking process, should you make it onto the final agenda.

Even if your talk doesn’t make the conference lineup, you’ve taken an important first step — and there are plenty of other avenues that you can explore to have your voice heard. The team behind DDD has a great knowledge of other conferences, meetups, and speaking events that might be right up your alley, and we’re more than happy to help you out with putting your name forward.

Every year the team receives a wide range of amazing submissions, and we love the amount of new voices we hear from with every new conference. We’d love to see your name on the list in 2023!