Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

Hello BarCampers! If you’ve never visited my blog, let me say Welcome to my little corner of the world. Feel free to wander around and click on stuff. Who know, you may find something you like.

My entry on the BarCamp Blog Tour is an audio file I recorded a couple of years ago. I’ve been involved in conference organization for around 7 years now. Along the way I’ve picked up a few pointers from speakers far better than me. While this was recorded with technical presentations in mind, all the tips work for speakers at conferences like BCN.
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Dear Reader,

Recently on twitter, @johncongdon asked me about proposals for conferences. Specifically, he asked if I had any examples that I can share because he was considering submitting to a conference. While I don’t have any examples to share, I can give you some advice on the topic.

First things first

Read Tips on how to get accepted as a speaker at a PHP conference, if you haven’t already. The process of getting accepted starts a lot earlier than the proposal, you need to lay the groundwork first.
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Dear Reader,

I sit here this morning working on my sixth PHP conference (ZendCon 06, 07, 08, DPC 09, tekx and now ZendCon 10) I have to sit back and reflect on how lucky I am. I get paid to help select the sessions that developers from around the world will sit in and learn in. It is truly humbling when I think about it.

One of the few downsides to planning a conference though is that any given Call for Papers usually generates a nine to one ratio of proposals to speaking slots. Do the math and you will see that for every one person I get to make happy, eight more think I am a total douche, or worse. I call the email’s “Dear John’s” because “rejection letters” seems so ugly. No matter what you call them though, it is never a happy time.
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Dear Reader,

In late September and early October, I will be part of the CodeWorks 09 tour. During CodeWorks I will be giving two new talks, “Design Patterns” and “5 Things”. I won’t, however, have the opportunity to give one of my favorite talks, “Open Teams:What Corporate IT Can Learn from Open Source Projects“. (If you’ve not read the blog post or reviewed the slides from the presentation, feel free to follow the link and see what it’s all about.)
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