 All right. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Nikki Acosta, and thank you for tuning in to Designing an OpenStack Summit Session Submission for Success. How is that for summer literation? So we are super honored to be presenting to you guys today. My name is Nikki. I am an individual member of the OpenStack Foundation. I also work for Cisco. I'm also part of the Women of OpenStack. And I am really honored to be joined by two amazing women today, Ann Gentel and Diane Mueller. So Ann, go ahead and introduce yourself. Sure. Thanks, Nikki. I'm Ann Gentel, and I wear a couple hats in OpenStack. I serve as the documentation program technical lead, and I also serve on the technical committee. And I'm pretty excited to talk more about proposals and presentations and getting more of us out there. So, and now Diane. Hi, I'm Diane Mueller. I'm the Director of Community Development at Red Hat for OpenShift, and I have been a participant in the OpenStack world since the days of Essex, and hopefully some of the tips and tricks that I have up my sleeve for getting my submissions selected for the OpenStack things will help all of you today. So I'm really pleased to be here, and also hopefully you'll use these tips to get successful presentations in lots of tech conferences, including Red Hat Summit, Dev Nation, and lots of other things. So happy to be here today. Thanks. Super. So let's get right into it, and let's talk about why we're really here. First, this is sponsored by the Women of OpenStack. And the Women of OpenStack is a group of women, obviously, that get together at all the OpenStack Summit and some of the other tech events. And so during the last summit, the Women of OpenStack got together, and they wanted to pick one thing that would help out the community and help other women within the OpenStack community. So one of the things that came up is that everyone there agreed that we wanted to see more women at the OpenStack Summit and at tech conferences in general. And so here we are. We wanted to give a presentation not just to cover kind of the OpenStack Summit, but speaking about OpenStack at other conferences and spread knowledge. And so if we throw around three-letter acronyms, we should also define them. We know that many women of OpenStack have only been to one summit or are planning to go to Vancouver for their first summit. So we wanted to get a good jumpstart on that experience. And we wanted to open it up to men as well who wanted some pro tips on how to not only design a good presentation, but to have some confidence in delivering that presentation as well. So the OpenStack Summit, obviously all this information is on the OpenStack.org site, but we're super excited to be heading to Vancouver this May. The way that the event is structured is going to be kind of similar to how it was in Paris. And so in the context of this presentation, what we're really talking about here today is going to be submitting a good presentation proposal for the actual summit component, not the design session. So the design session takes place with separate process altogether with all the developers that get together and kind of map out the future, what the OpenStack code base actually looks like. So we hope that you are all individual members. The board of directors election is going on now. There's some bylaw voting that's going on now. It is absolutely free to join at the OpenStack Foundation. So if you are interested, head on over to OpenStack.org register and we hope that you will be able to make it to Vancouver. Similar to last year, I think almost every single presentation in Paris was recorded and is now made available on the YouTube channel for OpenStack. And we expect the same this year. So not only do you get a chance to speak to the people at the OpenStack Summit if your talk is chosen, but you also have the ability to have that video as a way to share your message after the summit. Let's talk about the proposal system a little bit. Right now the window is open and this is when everyone submits their session ideas. It could be a hands-on lab. It could be a number of different community topics, workshops, those kinds of things. So once you are an individual member, you create a profile and you can go to OpenStack.org and submit your session. And the sessions are all then collected and then the voting window opens a few weeks later. Now once that voting window is open, all of the voting will take place online. Everybody will have a chance to review all of the sessions and either vote them up or vote them down. And this is a pretty neat process. It can be kind of time consuming. One thing I will note about the voting process is that in the last summit there were over 1,100 submissions for just about 100 talks. So even if your session doesn't make it, don't be discouraged. The rate of rejection is quite high. Does it mean that your session topic wasn't good or that you didn't get enough votes? It just means that by sheer number of submissions that were sent that yours didn't quite make it this time. Once the voting takes place, there is still another thing that happens kind of behind the scenes and that is the track process. So each track, be it community, be it enterprise, be it startup, will have a track lead. And the track lead job is to look at the votes and assemble the sessions and put them into the appropriate slots. Now there are some interesting things that can happen here. Track chairs have the ability to basically look at voting. If your company is stuffing the votes, in other words if you are getting all your coworkers to just vote for your session, the track chairs actually have the ability to see that. So they may in fact choose to vote down your talk or not include it. If there are several topics that seem redundant but they are along the same lines, the track chairs also have the ability to put you on a panel with other folks who have submitted a similar session talk. So the track chairs are really responsible for making sure that the track is represented well, that the time slots work with everybody's schedules, and that they are really in the best interest of the community. So submissions, voting, then tracks. Track chairs also then notify participants if their talks are accepted or rejected. There is one other thing that I would interject too, is that sometimes the track chairs do a little bit of course trading. And if your talk you submit it into a track and it is more appropriate for networking than it is community management or something, there is a little bit of that back and forth to get a good agenda for the day or the day and a half that part of the summit is going on. That's a great point. Yeah, this is Ann and I would also just interject. Don't be shy about promoting. I always get a little nervous around voting time and it's natural and you don't know whether you are putting yourself out there. But it's fine. And really the track chairs are the ones you can trust to get the right talks into the right slots and help you get your talk just right. So anyway, the system really is built to have community involvement with the voting and that's the participation level. But they are putting together a really good conference and that's the tweet early tweet often but then trust the track chairs. And both Diane and Mickey have been track chairs. It's a lot of responsibility. And if you can find out who you are you might get a few phone calls. They are secret. I didn't mean to call them out. No, I'm just kidding. So Ann, do you want to talk about audience analysis and how that breaks down? Yeah, absolutely. So I've been around OpenStack for quite a while now. Rackspace hired me and a community manager as a couple of their first two hires for OpenStack. And so this will be my 10th summit. And I just want to put in a couple of stories about what it looks like when you're there. And this photo is of a keynote session. And so I don't want to intimidate people. Typically for the kind of upholds, we'll be writing there are less than 100 people in the room not 3,000 like this one shows. But I also want to talk about how more than half of the audience is new to OpenStack. And so they may not know everything about OpenStack and may be there to learn and meet other people. So keep that in mind. I think for the Atlanta summit, there were like 700 people who signed up in the week prior to the summit. So just realize that a lot of it has to do with what region are we in. People suddenly realize that they can make those travel plans and they are going to get excited about OpenStack because it's right in their backyard. So the key is to not make knowledge assumptions. But I don't want women, especially to feel like you have to propose a beginner's track thing, be ready to tackle something deeply technical. Don't limit yourself. But I just wanted to point out that it's not fair to make assumptions of what people know when they come into your talk. But yeah, we can look at the next slide where we really break down the last two summits. Paris was the most recent in the fall and Atlanta was spring before. So Paris definitely saw an uptick in the number of people from Europe who were able to attend. And it was our first time in Europe. But I also want to point out, so that's talking to this first-time attendees. But also look at these stats. A fourth of the attendees are developers and self-identify that way. So they are going to be attending these sessions. They are going to be voting on the proposals even if your time is split with the design summit. In Paris that was the way the week went for me was very much in the design summit sessions while also I got a proposal accepted to talk about developer support. And there are still very much the CXO level people there looking at OpenStack strategically. And I think we are seeing a steady stream of operators, the people running OpenStack day-to-day. So don't feel like overwhelmingly it's going to be OpenStack contributors. It's people making OpenStack work in production. And honestly, the Atlanta summit was 65% first-time attendees that blew me out. I just couldn't even believe it. So just keep that in mind. This is just kind of a general overview for any conference that you are going to submit a proposal to. Make sure you understand the format. And I talk to people all the time and it's like OpenStack is really a very unique format. But these are general guidelines. Make sure that your title is something that you can remember but doesn't get too cutesy. You want to set out the problem and tell what people will learn from your proposal. You want to make sure you match the proposal to whatever is being requested. And so not only match it to the overall conference and the overall theme there, but also match it to if I'm going to do a 90-minute workshop, my outline has better show that I understand the timing of the workshop and that I know that I can't cover all of this particular corner of OpenStack in 10 minutes. I'd better take a half hour with that. And so when people review it, they're also going to just do that second check on, is this realistic? Definitely show what you know. Demonstrate your deep knowledge of the topic and make sure that people understand that you're going to bring value because you know your stuff. And Diane has a lot of tips coming up next for how to get through any conference proposals. I'd love to see more women at the conference I go to and have that confidence. So Diane, go ahead and walk through all of your tips and helpers. So this is really, I give a talk often just for both men and women and for new techies on how to get your CFP or call for papers. That's what we acronymized the whole process is submitting to these sessions. And this basically, if you go to the next slide there, I'm going to just walk through what I think are the key things and touched on it a little bit too. But really one of the key things for me is be relevant. Come in, know the context, know what release of OpenStack that's going to be talked about. Know your area of expertise and work with it. Work with whatever flavor of the project that you can integrate into. I think the next slide is what I go on to is the advanced one, is that you have to really be honest about it. Like I work at Red Hat and I work on a project called OpenShift that runs on top of OpenStack. And I have a corporate master, it's Red Hat. And we have agendas about getting visibility of our projects and the work that we're doing and getting more people to participate in our community and on our projects. So I have an agenda. But the context for the OpenStack conference is really all about OpenStack. And so when I'm putting in a presentation to the OpenStack conference, what I'm going to do is I'm not going to say give me an hour of this OpenStack agenda to talk about platform as a service. I'm going to say look at an aspect and in my case it's heat that we use to deploy OpenShift. And OpenShift just happens to be part of the example program that our application that gets done. And really what I'm doing when I submit my talk is I'm talking and using a use case for heat or Kubernetes and Docker or whatever the new piece of the technology is that's of interest to this particular audience. So I try not to, and when you're submitting especially with OpenStack, we really try not to select people that are doing vendor pitches. So the best thing to do is acknowledge, don't try and hide it. Don't come in and blindside the audience with a vendor pitch. But really be honest with yourself and your submissions, who you're working for, what the projects are that you're working with. But also try and incorporate the pieces of OpenStack that your project or product works with. I think that's really key here. Agreed. If I could add one thing to that. In the context of OpenStack, the project is so wide and so broad that if your talk is about how to make one component of OpenStack run on your specific vendor's hardware, that doesn't really have as broad of an audience. So the broader you can make your stuff apply to in the context of OpenStack and less about the particular, let's say hardware that is made by the company you work for, the more votes that you're going to get. As a track chair, I have absolutely been guilty of bumping down the vendor commercials where someone is going to get on stage and tell you why they are the best thing since sliced bread. In the context of being on stage… I wouldn't feel guilty. I never feel guilty about that. I do because people voted on it, but I don't because nobody wants to hear a vendor pitch. In the context of being relevant as well, relevancy doesn't mean, hey, your talk has to be all about OpenStack, the code. We have done many panels. In the last summit, Diane and I did a gender diversity panel. There is community building. There is stuff that applies specifically around startup culture. So as long as it has relevancy to the community and the people of the community, then it is a relevant talk. It doesn't necessarily have to be about OpenStack or about the code base or about any one particular project. If it's relevant to OpenStack and the members of OpenStack, then it's a relevant submission. I was just going to interject that I had a lot of rack space injection in my proposal, but the track chair said, hey, when you give the talk, make sure you're talking across clouds. This is about OpenStack clouds. And so I was able to use Tri-Sack. I signed up for an HP Cloud account. And so the track chairs will keep you honest. We're telling you to be honest, but I'm telling you, your track chairs will keep you honest as well. Absolutely. All right, so let's slide on to the next one. So the other one here, I think, is we touched on this as well a little bit earlier, but I'm going to go back to that. Be confident in your description. Talk about where you have expertise if you're a contributor to the code base, if you led a project. This is really the knowledge and confidence. It's really very much top of mind. We need to know what your expertise is in your bio, when you're writing your bio for this. Be clear on how you've contributed to this project. If you're an end user, tell us that. Tell us you love end users. But if you can really be very – don't be tentative, I think, is the biggest piece of advice. Don't say, well, I just used this a little bit, but – and I think I know this. Be really confident. Know your stuff. And I think Nikki was talking earlier today about when you're trying to choose what you want for a topic. One thing that you're passionate about, the worst thing you can do is get up there on stage and be monotone about it and not engage the audience. Agreed. When I sit down with engineers, they're like, oh, I need to submit something. I just don't know what to submit. And I say, okay, what are you passionate about and what do you work on every day? People take it for granted that they have domain expertise in a particular component of OpenStack. And they're dealing with it every day. They have any kind of special knowledge. But look, OpenStack is a relatively new technology. The expertise is very hard to find in the scope of employers who are looking for employees who know this stuff. So chances are, if you're working with OpenStack, you probably know a lot more than others know. And you probably know more than you think you know. So if you're working with something every day, you're also going to have a lot of domain expertise that really helps when you go to present, because it's not a topic that's kind of new and fresh to you. If you're working on it every day, then it should be a subject matter that you're comfortable with. Perfect. Next up. So this is an interesting thing, too. If you're a contributor, really make sure that you mention that. Contributors, a lot of them are over in the design summit during the regular summit. But contributors definitely get respect and priority. So if you've been working on the project in any aspect, organizing, documentation, QA, testing, it's not just all about the code. Definitely make sure that you mention that in your bio and even if you can, put a few links into the project that you're going to be talking to in the description, because we use that when we're validating which talks are going to be get more respect and get more people into the room and people are going to learn from. So this is a really good thing to do. The other thing to do is to definitely help in the organizing of open-stack events and make sure that you make yourself available to help out promoting your presentation. Next up. So say you're not totally 100% confident. One of the things that you can do is tag team. I love this technique. It actually works really good for me because a lot of the times you're giving a presentation and you also need to do a demo. So sometimes I'll bring along someone to do the demo portion and type that because it's, you know, that if anything can go wrong and you're doing a live demo on stage, that's the part that will go wrong. It also helps to, you can each carry part of a load of doing the research and creating the presentation. And it's also easier to get your presentation and you've got two people who are going to be on the stage and bring two people's worth of expertise to the project. So that's a good way to do that, especially if maybe you're not. This is your first time presenting. Next up. Next slide. The other thing that I really like to say is bring a customer really to anyone. There's nothing more compelling than bringing a real user story to an audience. And that will probably get you chosen over any dry technical talk on the planet because there's nothing more than we want to know is how OpenStack's being used, how the different technologies are being used, what impact it's making on what people are doing and then really kind of helping us understand better what we need to do to make OpenStack really rock. And that's a favorite thing for all track chairs and voting too. Absolutely. OpenStack, I kind of liken it to kind of a blank canvas. It gives you all the components to do X, Y, Z. But that X, Y, Z, I've seen people do things with OpenStack that's never been done before. I've seen things that no one ever thought would be a good use case for OpenStack. So the more that people, actual users share their stories, the better it is for the community as a whole. Yeah, I would definitely say that as a contributor to OpenStack, those are the ones that I would go back and look for on video and take the time to watch are the user stories. And it really, I find it inspirational. Tim Bell speaking about what they're doing is really helping me continue to work hard on OpenStack. So absolutely, bring the customers, bring the people doing cool things with OpenStack. We love that stuff. Next up. All right, so we've got a customer that was the last suggestion, tag teaming, panelizing. Someone in the chat asked about this earlier. Yes, you can create a panel and submit a session. Two things that I would say about this is it's a great way to get your talk accepted, especially if you bring in your competition. It allows for some interesting lively debates. People always love to see differences of opinions. And the other thing that I would say is make sure is when you're doing your submission that everybody you put on that panel has already previously agreed to speak with you before you submit your paper. A number of times people have put in this and then I put my name on panels and then I find out after the fact that I've been accepted to speak on a panel conference that I hadn't even planned on going to. So ask upfront and make sure that everybody will. But panelizing is a wonderful way to get your talk accepted and to bring multiple points of view. We did one at a couple of OpenStacks ago that had early day docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift Paz. We had like three or four things and people and it was great. The room was packed. Everybody, each of the members of the panel brought their own network of people to the presentation and instead of just everybody coming and listening to me go on and on about heat and how to use heat to deploy this and that. We got some really good points of view and a lot of audience engagement. So panelizing is awesome. If you're thinking about a panel too, one strategy you might use is reach out to people who have the same role as you at different companies. One of our product managers wanted to do a product manager forum submission for Vancouver and so I got on Twitter and I just said, hey, anyone interested in doing a product management session panel at OpenStack? And literally within like 10 minutes I had like nine responses. So there's probably people that also want to panelize and just need to reach out and figure out who their counterparts are at other companies. But there's nothing more exciting I think than a panel that has competitors in the panel who have drastically different methodologies and different strategies as they approach OpenStack. So those differences in view are kind of what makes OpenStack so awesome. So the next slide here is really start to dive into what it is you actually have to do. When you're writing these descriptions and you're submitting and picking in titles and creating panels, make sure that your submission is clear and complete. If English is not your first language, we understand that. We get submissions from all over the place. So try and find someone to proof the presentation. If your selection is chosen, we definitely will give you a hand fixing things if your English is your second language and if it shows. So we're really good about that. Don't worry too much about that. But really make sure you get the bios in, a picture in, links into the project in your description. And if you click on that URL there, over at O'Reilly, they have some great sample proposals. And I don't know if Allison is driving this. You can click on that. We can just pop over and take a peek there. I think that click will work. Maybe not. I don't know if it's live linking. It's not live linking. It's because you're using PowerPoint, not LibreOffice or RevealJM. But here, the site is, I think, a really good example of, and there's a couple of examples here about creating a good title, a description that's clear. If your first opening bit really tells me in the first paragraph what the problem is, what the talk's going to address, and what the attendees will learn, that is really good. Using bullets down the bottom here is great. We're going to read as track chairs hundreds and hundreds of abstracts. So don't feel bad about just being bullet and being clear. And just make sure you tell us what the goals are, what the points are we're going to learn here. There's a couple of more here. So this is really, I don't know, Annie or Nicky, if you want to jump in here. These are really good examples. I've read some really bad abstracts. I think the worst one I ever did, I couldn't anonymize it enough. It was too obvious who it would be to share it as an example on this one, but it was a one-liner, something like it wasn't ironic or a neutron. I'm going to talk about, or we're going to talk about neutron and give you an update, one line. And then two people from the same company, they didn't have their pictures, they didn't have their bios. They assumed I knew who they were. One of them I did. And it got voted up because they were from a relatively large company and they were well known. So it might have been a great presentation, but you can't go on just a one line. So really, this is probably the most important thing you do is be clear and complete about your presentation submission. Again, the great thing about it is that it really says, this is a technology presentation. This is about upping your skills. These can be broken down into, they have been precisely applied to the right track, the titles are great, the points are made, you know what you'll learn. I really appreciated this from O'Reilly for sure. I tend to stay away from the I, I will do this, you will learn. I kind of try to use like, in this session attendees will instead of you will. I also like to make sure when you're putting an abstract together that it's focused on the attendees. These are people who are going to be voting for your stuff. So make it about what the attendee is going to gain rather than what you are going to give. You can either say, hey, join this session and I'm going to talk about all these things, or you can say in this session attendees will learn or will gain knowledge and expertise on solving challenges to XYZ. You want to make it really focused on the person who's going to vote and the person who's going to attend versus making it all about you. All right, let's pop back in the slides and see if we can get through this so we can do some Q&A too. Next up. I know we said not to be too cute about your titles, but it's, you need to get the word out and tweeting and social media are the key ways of getting this out. So if you pick a title, make sure that it's something that when you, because the OpenStack voting and sharing methodology is totally tweetable. If you click on your submission, it'll generate the tweet for you based on the title. So think about that. What that is, is all you say is OpenStack and you tweet OpenStack, then that's not a great title. It's not going to get you anybody to vote for you. So definitely tweet about it, but make sure your title is not too cute, but definitely informative enough. Next slide. So promote your talk as soon as you submit it. It's a fact of life. Just in this OpenStack conference in Red Hat Summit in Dev Nation and lots and lots of other technology conferences that I participate in, it is voting based for the most part of who gets chosen. Some talks it's not, but some conferences it's not, but in this one you are required to do some promotions of your talk. So I say as soon as you submit it, because you should let the people within your own company know that you've submitted something. A lot of times, a lot of times we submit papers because if we don't get a paper accepted, our companies won't fund us to travel to Hong Kong or Paris or wherever it is because they want you to have a talk accepted. So we know this, but you also should let your boss know the PR team within your company know that you've done this. Work with your product manager and the other people within your company as soon as you submit it, let them know because they probably also have voting rights as well and then you can set it up. We did mention earlier that sometimes people can overload, they don't try and overload the voting, but it's obvious. It's painful. It is obvious. Don't think you can get away with it. Yeah. I know, right? If everybody from Red Hat votes for Dianne's next talk, then we know that it's all Red Hat all the time. I mean, Dianne, something you said reminds me that not just at the promotion phase, should you reach out to your communications team. I know that the idea of building a story is really helpful if you can have communications people help you build the story very early on. I know it's not relevant to this slide, but very much connected to you probably have people at your company or people in your circles who can help you uncover the best idea, right? Tell it as a story. Find out what's interesting. I don't know if I have research to orient this way, but that women think, oh, I'm doing this work, but it's only interesting to me. I don't know if anybody else would want to know about it. Well, goodness, go find some people at your company. You can bounce off ideas, and they'll give you honest feedback about what's interesting, how to tell it in a way that compels others to hear it. All right. I'm getting disconnected, so I'm not quite sure why I'm saying that. Yes, I have been disconnected, but I'm still on the phone call. I can hear you. Good. My picture came right back. There you go. So let's go to the next slide. I just got a message. Let's hit up the next slide. Maybe they got disconnected, too. Maybe they got disconnected. There you go. There you go. Vote for yourself. I saw it for half a second. There we go. So the one thing I always say, especially to women, is make sure you vote for yourself. It would be silly if you missed out by one vote and it was yours. So make sure you do vote for yourself and get others, too. So when the voting opens for OpenStack after all the submissions close, go to the page with your submission, tweet it out, send it out in your internal emails, go to the women of OpenStack email list, post it there, let us know that you've submitted something. You do need to get the word out. If your topic is so compelling when I'm reading through 11,000 things to think about voting, maybe I will vote for you. But the idea that anyone is going to read through all 11,000 and pick the top 100 themselves and vote for those is just not going to happen. You really do need to get the vote out. Next slide. So I keep saying this, and I feel a little bit like a broken record, but network with your peers. You've got the women of OpenStack mailing lists. I get lots of other, whatever the group is or the project or subproject you're working in in OpenStack, whether it's Neutron or Horizon or Ironic, or if you're working on Docker stuff and Kubernetes stuff like I am and also Platform of the Service branch out and tell everybody you know there's a lot of people out there. If you're on IRC, if you're in Slack or any of those things, if you mention it to people, ask them if they are going to OpenStack. If they're planning to, you should all be, by the way, you should all be planning on coming to Vancouver. It's my hometown. It's one of the most gorgeous places on Earth. So you do want to be here. And make sure you get yourselves here. And this is really, it's not just about making the submission and writing the most awesome abstract. You do have to get network with your peers and make sure. The other thing I would say is I don't think the track chairs are announced for OpenStack, but you can look up who are the last, last year's track chairs, talk to them, talk to, look up, look on the videos from the past conferences and see who else talked on that topic. And see if you can get them to contribute to the conversation about your submission and do that. That's a great way. And if you have your top 10 that you want people to vote for, tweet out your top 10 and include yourself. I would add to the network with your peers too. If you are one of the fortunate folks whose session gets approved, your session fee is actually waived. And a lot of times we've actually been able to take those passes and the ones that we had already paid for and give those to other people in the company who wanted to go, but maybe there wasn't enough budget. But once you do get to the summit, it's always great. It's a great place to meet other people and share ideas. So many times I've seen people from the same company that end up hanging out together the whole time. And they drink together and they go out together and that's great. But this is open source and it's a community and it's really good to get out and meet your peers while you're at the summit and just have a different perspective on maybe the projects you're working on or how you're consuming or using the technology. That kind of chit-chat in the context, that water cooler talk in the context of open source is incredibly valuable. Yeah, so one of the things that's awesome for me as a community manager and a person who's worked on lots of virtual projects is this is the one time where I get face-to-face time with people that I've been on IRC and chatting with, sharing stuff and GitHub and forking their code. And I have no idea who these people are. And then they show up and they stand in front of you and you go, oh my God, you're so-and-so. You're Mojave Linux. Oh, no, you're this. It's so awesome to actually put a face to someone who you've been working with from all parts of the globe and they're all coming to OpenSAC Summit. And this is really a huge opportunity to branch out and make those connections. And you have more of them than you think. And those are the folks that can also ask to vote for your submission. Next slide. All right. This is key, I think, as well, especially for people who are new. There are a lot of new people in the OpenSAC world at each conference. If you're interested in mentoring, if you're looking for people just to bounce your presentations off, we're out here. There's lots of us just asked us. The three of us that are on this call today have worked a lot with other people and helped coach them to get not just submissions, but how to contribute code or documentation and just how to get started in OpenSAC. It's a big, huge project. And mentors are really what help get people connected and we're definitely out here. We just need to ask. So please, please do so. It's probably the key success factor for participating in OpenSAC is finding other people that can help you. And so, yeah. The other thing is we really hope this is a beautiful picture. This is actually one of my favorite places and it is actually where the conference is going to take place. It's Vancouver in the evening. I can't wait. You just wait. The float planes come in behind there. It's gorgeous. It's actually the green roof. There's a grass roof there. The views from here are just awesome. So I really hope to see you on the stage in the upcoming Vancouver summit and at other conferences around the world too. So please do submit. And that would be a great one. You see our faces here. One thing we forgot to mention is when you're submitting your talk or your submission proposal, there's a place to upload a photo. If you're voting for 1,100 things, chances are the ones with the photos are probably going to stand out more than the little goosey avatar. So make sure you upload a photo because I think it adds a little bit more personality to your session talk. If you add panelists as well, make sure that they add a photo so that your videos are updated. OpenStack will cling on to previous bios. So if you just use your login, it will pull the most recent bio that you submitted if you haven't updated that and you've switched companies or titles or if you've gained different expertise that may not necessarily be reflected. So come back and once you upload everything, double check it. Sometimes the formatting can get a little wonky, especially if you copy-paste. So you'll want to come back and do that. But we are here to help. On Twitter, we also have some resource slides here in the deck that have links to great places. One thing we'll add to this before we'll post it is the Paris Summit schedule that has all of the abstracts for all the winning sessions. If you want to go back and you want to look at those, there's also videos for the past seminar on the YouTube channel that you can go back and watch, especially if you're interested about the format of a panel or something else like that. Somebody asked how track chairs are selected. I actually don't have a clear answer for that. I think it's a little bit of a nomination. Usually I think the board members kind of discuss it and we'll pull in people who've been speakers in the past or people who are very active in the community. Is there someone on the lines in the foundation, Allison or Claire, that can provide some clarity on that question? Claire just stepped out, but we can follow up with it in the blog post on how the track chairs are selected and provide that kind of clarification there as well. I think a lot of it is, there's so many to do and most of us are so busy that they're looking, they often try and get volunteers to do it too. So I know that past chairs tend to get reselected if they're willing to give time, but you can always volunteer yourself to be a track chair if you have an area of expertise and time to do the vetting of all of these things. So please do reach out to the eventspeople at OpenStack, I think it's eventsadopensack.org and ask any further questions you might have. Feel free to reach out to Ann or Nikki or myself and we'll definitely give you a hand getting things done and getting things in on time. And again, February 9th is the cutoff date for submissions for the OpenStack Summit. I know Red Hat's designation has just got extended to I think the 23rd of January. There's lots of great places to submit and I really hope you will do so and then we'll see you on stage some place soon. So there were a couple of questions in the chat and followed up about if you want to volunteer as a track chair, you can go to email eventsadopensack.org that goes to the foundation. Typically people who are track chairs have been to previous summits and have been a speaker in a previous summit in the track for which they are a track chair. So it does require some level of domain expertise to be able to be a track chair. And of course they want to make sure that whoever the track chair is that they have some level of discretion, right? It's a pretty arduous task to go through and pick the winning sessions and combine others into a panel. And so it does require a lot of back and forth with people who have submitted. Somebody else asked if you have to have your slides turned in in advance. I have never, I don't think that's the case. I have never turned my slides in in advance and like loaded them up to some kind of master system or something. Typically you'll bring your laptop. It's always a good idea to, if you have a funky connection to bring an appropriate dongle for your computer be it a Mac or a PC or whatever. But you basically can just show up and plug in your computer. They will always have microphones, both wireless and wired mics. If you're doing a panel they'll set up chairs. So they have all that stuff available for you. You just need to bring your actual slide presentation. I've also seen people bring them on USB sticks to give them to the presentation folks in the room. But I prefer usually to bring my own computer just to make sure that none of my fonts get wacky for example. Another person on the chat. I know the chat may not necessarily show up on the recorded video here after the fact. But I think somebody else had a really good tip. There's a shout out here to IBM for the awesome napkins at the summit. It's just incredibly cool. What was the other tip? I'm looking at the actual form that you submit. So you have to have a title. There are 17 general topics to try to select the best fit. But then if you have another topic, you can put that in. You select a level for the presentations to beginner, intermediate, or advanced. And then abstract itself is HTML inside of the – it doesn't have to be plain text. And that's it. Someone had asked about the number of words. And honestly, a rule of thumb for a blog post even anymore is about 400 to 800 words. So just consider the person who like me is really truly going to read 100 submissions. Make sure I can get through them. I can understand your point. I can understand what people are going to get out of the session just has that – what do you want to call it? Empathy for the reviewers when you're reading a bunch of submissions. The other pro tip came from Diane. Diane, you had a great point. As you're doing a demo, please, please, please, please, please bring a backup of your demo like either some kind of recorded thing or flash-based thing. We've had instances at OpenSax Summit where keynote speakers had demos fail. And that's never a good situation. So always bring some kind of backup or screenshots if you plan on doing a demo. If you're doing a hands-on lab, make sure you let your attendees know what the requirements are in terms of what they need to bring or what they need to have loaded on their laptops. Like if it requires virtual box, you'll want to let attendees know that they should be running virtual box version X. Here you go. Yeah, I have too many times my live demos have gone south. So having a backup video of it. And a lot of the times the reason for the video is because the thing that you want to demonstrate takes too long. Nobody wants to watch something compile and drip on the screen one line at a time. So it is fair game to create a video and speed it up a little bit on the really dry boring bits. Because we are talking about deploying infrastructure, some of creating clusters. So people talk about incredible fast speeds. It still does take time. So if it's not cheating to have a video, it's good practice actually. And Malini had a good point about that. And Malini, you're absolutely right. The network is often overloaded at the summit. Everyone's got two or three or four or five devices. I will say, props to the OpenSAC Foundation. Tera's connectivity was actually really good. But you can't always depend on conference Wi-Fi for a demo or to replay a video. There are a number of tools out there, like if you wanted to play a YouTube video that you can actually use to download that YouTube video down to your laptop to have it stored locally so you're not streaming it from the web. There's offliberty.net or offliberty.com, OFF Liberty is a tool that I use to be able to pull down any YouTube content to my laptop to play. I think there's another, not to wrap this up, but I think there is another webinar that we could do about once your submission gets accepted, how to make sure you have an awesome presentation. And the tips and tricks for that because we could probably talk another hour about all the things we've learned, the mistakes we've made, and the best practices for doing demos. That, I think, would be an awesome thing to try and do sometime. Agreed. At least a blog post or something, right? Or maybe a person at the next Women of OpenStack party. Yeah, Emily, you had a really good tip too. The brown bag sessions. So there are a number of, quote-unquote, other speaking opportunities at the summit. People from the Cube are usually there, and they'll usually interview people from different companies. The guys from B Brown Bag are always there, and they usually do some kind of broadcasted session stuff, usually in a conference room set off to the side. There are demo theater presentations. I think there were even discussions of having some kind of lightning talk format for a couple hours during this year just in case your talk doesn't get accepted. So there's definitely opportunities if you're not included on the official track to be able to find another avenue to share your message. And so the B Brown Bag guys, they're all on Twitter, but if you have any questions or you're curious about that, reach out to us. Nicholas Chase had a suggestion on ways to be able to pull, I guess, videos down to your laptop locally. Keepvid.com is another way to be able to locally download a video. So thank you for that suggestion. And the one other thing I would say is make sure you bring your dungle with you. Don't expect anyone to have the exact dungle you need. If you can, bring one with you. Yeah, because taking your, trying to get on Wi-Fi and email your presentation at the last minute on not so great Wi-Fi is really difficult to do. Ben, they're done now. Not very fun. All right. All right. Well, I see people have questions. I think we've done it. And I look forward to seeing everybody in Vancouver, my hometown. And if you have any questions about Vancouver or OpenStack Summit that's coming up, let me know. And I will do my best to help you get to Vancouver. Yeah. Yay. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for your time. Bye. Bye, guys.