 can start educating everyone about the call for papers and how to submit a winning abstract. I've got Brendan here on the line with me from the Drupal Association and he is helping me with Q&A. So as we go through this webcast, feel free to use Q&A to ask questions and he'll interrupt me if I don't see it. And we have a great list of people here from all kinds of different companies. Some names I have known for many years and some that are new to me. So all of you welcome and thank you for participating in DrupalCon and helping to make our event so educational and helpful by providing really great content and hopefully this webcast will help out. So just a little bit about me for those that don't know me. My name is Megan Sannakie, I'm the COO. I oversee all of our community and revenue programs here and make sure that we are really on track to serve our mission which is keeping the community together and focused to make great software. And that's me in the middle if you couldn't guess and at any time if you want to reach out to me with questions that's my email address and you can also tweet questions to the Drupal Association. We're always happy to help. I am going to record this webinar and send the recording out to everyone along with the slides. You're going to see there's just a choke full of information in here with links that give you all the source information and so it's going to be helpful I think for you to have these slides and so I'll send that out to you right after the call. So today for an agenda we're going to cover a couple areas. We're going to talk about what is the session selection process. How to write a winning abstract and I have some special tips for sponsors and then I want to take a closer look at Drupalkind New Orleans and the tracks that are available and the types of content that the track chairs are looking for and then we'll talk about how you can just pass go and bypass that community process if you just are you you can buy a session and get on stage in a different way. They're all great options and I'll cover all of them. Hey Megan we've had a request come in to use presenter mode so it's a little bigger on screen. Sure I can do that great hopefully that's better. That's beautiful thank you. Good okay so diving in to about the session selection so you can see for anyone that hasn't been to a Drupalkind this is what a typical session room looks like and get a podium at the front and some support from tech and off you go with your slides. So Drupalkind New Orleans will be the first opportunity for submitting your abstract. The event is from May 9th to the 13th and that Monday is when we hold training in summits Tuesday through Thursday is when we have keynotes and sessions so this is when your sessions would be running. We do have sprints on Friday where the community comes together and works on the project. For Drupalkind New Orleans the call for papers closes February 29th at right before midnight New Orleans local time that's really important because we don't accept late submissions and I'm going to encourage everyone to get started on this process of creating your abstract as soon as we get off the call. We'll just take advantage of the whole month we have lots of resources that'll help you. The sessions as I mentioned there's community selected sessions and there are paid sessions so I'll go through both options. So I want to focus on the community selected sessions first because that is where the vocal of the opportunities are. So we have 13 tracks in total and each track has so many sessions associated with it they combine to 143 sessions so they kind of just gives you a scope of how many how many slots there are there's a lot of people that submit. So sessions are 60 minutes long and we do record them and post them up on YouTube where they get thousands of more views from people around the world. We have different formats that you can use you can present alone you can co-present with another expert or you can host a panel and we do offer speakers a free ticket to Drupalcon one speaker per session. I want to call out that our session selection process is run by the community. We do have a staff member named Amanda Ganzer who project manages this whole session selection process but the ones that are the real experts picking the tracks and the session themes and the actual sessions are community members and they do it purely as a volunteer service. We have two to three volunteers assigned to each track and they are experts in that tracks focus. They are the ones that define the themes they decide what are the kinds of content that our community needs to be educated on so they are the ones that identify the types of sessions that we need to talk about and as they go through this process they receive over 500 sessions so that's a ton of volume to go through as volunteers and it's also important for you to understand how many session submissions we receive knowing that we only have 143 slots to film so there's a lot of competition out there which is why it's really important to know how to write that winning abstract. So when the volunteers receive all these 500 plus session submissions they have two weeks to go through them all they rank them and they select sessions if you're looking for more in-depth explanations I did provide this link which you'll receive when you get the slides but it's obviously a pretty big job but it's really great to have a Drupal expert in charge of picking the Drupal content and so I want to drill into some pro tips on how you can get your session selected and this is kind of like generic this is for anyone whether they are a sponsor or not a sponsor these are all important tips to follow so one of the first things is who you are as a as a session submitter matters the tractors are looking for speakers who have proven speaker experience and that they are known in the Drupal community as an expert and so speaking at CAMS and showing that you have spoken at CAMS is a good way to demonstrate this maybe you've spoken at other conferences other industry events it'd be great to highlight that and your submission we'll talk a little bit more about this if you are not known in the Drupal community because maybe you work for a software vendor or you work for a hosting company but you have a lot of speaking experience in Drupal knowledge you just maybe haven't gone to a camp yet so we'll talk about how to work through that the reason I encourage you to start the writing process now is that you want to go through kind of an editing process and really use the next couple weeks before the deadline to get feedback from different people the first thing you want to do is you want to go to the event site and you want to read about the different tracks that we offer and the in the track chairs put on the pages what kinds of sessions they're looking for so they're very clear about the kind of content that they want and so I have a link here that takes you right to all the tracks and we're going to go through that at a high level later on in the presentation the track chairs are also there to answer your questions so if you see a track and the session descriptions that they're looking for you might still have some questions of is this a good idea or how can I make this idea better the track chairs want to hear from you so reach out to them right away and get their feedback again I have a link in here that will take you right to the page that has a way for you to contact them and as you're writing you want to make sure you're telling a story something that really will resonate with your audience you definitely don't want to do pitches so if you know a software vendor or hosting company don't just talk about your software I think Drupal shops those are those of you that are on the line know this already but you really want to say like what is the problem and what is the solution and do it in a way that's telling a story and make sure that you are really clear in your abstract who this session is for is it for a technical audience a beginner technical audience and what are the takeaways what are they going to learn from you and then just make sure it's proofread like anything you know quality matters and there are a few other tips but those are some of the really important ones I wanted to call out but if you go to this link you'll see there's some other really good ideas to to follow and so as you write up your abstract and hopefully you've talked to the track chairs to get some ideas you can go to other experts out there ask them for feedback you can even ask your account manager if someone at the Drupal Association can give you feedback our CTO Josh Mitchell has offered this before in the past of people and then when you're ready to submit go ahead and post this online and this is another reason why you want to do this want to submit sooner than later is that the community is going to give you feedback and if they start asking questions or you get something that you might want to drill into you have a chance to go and edit your abstract and improve it before the deadline so again when you do submit make sure you submit on time we don't have exceptions for late submissions and the link I've provided here is uh just the the link to where you go to submit your session so I'm going to go out of presentation oh I think it works great I want to show you an example of a winning abstract um and I'm sorry Amanda couldn't be here she's actually in India setting up Drupal Khan Asia but she said this was a really good example of an abstract that you should look to so this is was provided uh the session was called front to end ops and the reason it's great is that the first thing that it talks about is the problem question you know it talks about how websites need to be fast and how front end is most often the real bottleneck and the question is how do you keep things humming and get all of your work done at the same time right so this is just a problem that can resonate with people in the front end front end developers and then it goes into the real solution is front end ops and it talks about what front end ops is and how the session is going to cover it uh and what you're going to learn from this session it goes into how uh who the session is for um and that it's going to be technical in nature and it tells it explains what the attendees will need to know to have a good foundation to understand this talk additionally uh this presenter uh provided slides and examples of past speaking opportunities around this topic so that you could see that they are an expert and were good speakers and so it's it's very tight and was really well received you could even see that there were comments added when it was submitted it was considered cool and looks great and ah this is the nerdy shit so if you get those kinds of comments you know you're in really good shape but maybe you're going to have comments that say what about this what about that and that's where you can go back in and uh make some tweaks to make it stronger so in short just make sure it has the who what where when why uh of writing i'm going to switch back over so there are some special things i want to call out for sponsors when you are writing your abstract so uh i mentioned that the track chairs are looking for experts specifically those that are known in the in the Drupal community and like i said maybe we're for a software company that has an integration with Drupal maybe you're a hosting service uh that's used often to power Drupal sites um you you certainly don't want to um lose an opportunity because you're not known in the Drupal community um so if you haven't been doing talks uh at camps and things like that that is okay what we do recommend is that you partner with someone that's known in the community maybe it's your Drupal customer maybe it's someone at a Drupal shop that's done an implementation with your module um there's lots of ways to partner and to have a really strong speaking team uh and and so if you don't know how to find those people i do recommend you reach out to your account manager we have a program called partner connect where we can do some research kind of understand what you're trying to achieve and who would make a really strong co-presenter with you and we'll do the introductions to that person and help you um see if there's any well any they're there if they would like to co-present with you and what that story would be that you want to share together uh and so i have a link in here about partner connect it's a super lightweight program but it's really just a service to help you connect with the right people in the community and it expands much much further than just Drupal con um there was one other thing i wanted to point out too is um um when you are as a sponsor especially a software vendor or a hosting company just again you want to make sure you're it's not a pitch you want to tell a story and what i recommend is a case study so this is again where it'd be great if you have a joint customer maybe um you can bring in that joint customer to tell the story with you uh you can work with a developer that implemented a solution for a client and have them come in with you but it's really important that you tell a story that will resonate and educate and um i would say you want to tell a case study about what the client's problem was how you and your your service or product along with Drupal solved that pain point and then you can drill in as you need to if you need to talk about that specific module and anything that might be a developer might want to know um you know you want to get away from demos but if the demo really does help your story make sure it is told or is shared within the context of a case study i think that's really important and again if you need some brainstorming ideas please reach out to the account managers reach out to me we're happy to help you brainstorm maybe we've had a question come in here uh asking during submitting the abstract they want to know whether the slides are mandatory or can they be added after the session is submitted uh you can add anything after the session is submitted uh i would you know you just has to be there um before the deadline because once the deadline passes everything's locked down and that whatever you've provided is what is being reviewed by the track chairs great thank you and we've had one more come in asking if we've considered ways to involve the greater community aside from just having experts to determine which submissions get selected oh that's a really good question um we have historically used um community members but we are reaching out for example the php track we are bringing in an expert from php architect um so uh that is definitely someone from from the outside and i'll have to look to see if we are expanding that i do know we have a track provided by sencio labs and getting the um symphony experts to come in to select content on that track um but that's a that's a really good question i'll look to see i think if i think it's always smart to bring in outside perspective great that's it so far okay good okay so triple con norlands the call for papers is open it closes february 29th the um track chairs have chosen their tracks and they have um identified the types of sessions that they are looking for um so these are the tracks uh it ranges from business coding and development core conversations dev ops triple dot org front end horizons php project management site building symphony and ux many of these apply to the audience today so i'm going to go over them at a high level these are the ones that are the community selected tracks we also have the sponsor track called business showcase uh i'm going to save that to to the end there's a pretty straightforward um path for that one so let's talk just a little bit about business tracks um the business and strategy track is it is for drupal shops but it's also for those that are in the digital experience business so it's much for much more than just drupal shops these sessions are non-technical in nature and the track chairs are looking for sessions that range from recruiting and hiring company culture sales and marketing digital strategy products and surface offerings and the track chairs are also looking for sessions that are going to share a real relevant experience that has a good you know a good story driven narrative so they definitely are looking for these kinds of case studies and stories for the best practices that you want to share they are definitely looking for ideas outside of the core drupal ecosystem so if you have experience maybe working in another company or you are a company that's not in the drupal community in the sense that you're a software vendor that serves many different communities you have a great perspective and so i think that you could really leverage that when you tell your story and submit a session in this area another thing to know about the business track is they are looking for sessions given by one to two people they prefer that over a panel so something to keep in mind again all of this information and even more information is found on the the website and so you'll have links to all of that i'm just going to give you the highlights please note on the upper right hand corner the track leads i'll have the track leads here for each of the tracks i go over and again i just encourage you to reach out to them sooner than later to get some guidance on the on the session ideas that you have okay the next track is coding and development and well as you know drupal 8 is now released so the coding and development track wants to definitely focus on drupal 8 and specifically it wants to educate developers on the latest techniques and tools that are going to help developers make great projects uh track chairs are looking for sessions that cover best practices for coding and debugging in drupal 8 drupal migrations upgrading contributes to drupal 8 how to work with other frameworks and technologies and they're looking for shared experience around high performance and large-scale development so i'll apply some obvious candidates there the dev ops track um well this is obviously a pretty popular topic um since seeing a real rise and interest in this area um the dev ops track chair is looking for sessions that cover a wide range of experiences um associated with dev ops and they're also looking for people to share their experiences um and implementing dev ops so the knowledge and skills that people will need to to know to to embrace dev ops and their organization um so they want attendees to learn how uh how to help developers and operations work better together and that can range from automating processes to creating dashboards so there's just a lot that can be focused on here i think there's this is an area where if you're uh providing a third party software that helps in dev ops this is a great place for you to educate our community if you are a drupal shop that's embrace this this is a great time to share your expertise and what maybe moving to a dev ops practice looks like lots i think there's just a lot of room to educate the community here as a sponsor the next one is the front end track um i showed you an example of a session from front end already but this year let's see the track chairs are looking for sessions that answer the question how can developers keep up and marry the best front end practices with the best of what drupal offers that's nice and and broad uh so specifically what they're looking for sessions that talk about the technologies and procedures that front end developers use today and that can range from preprocessors build automation javascript and css architecture new template systems and client side applications and you know much more um you know if you have experience around um building a a headless drupal site this would be a great track for you to share i think everyone is really interested about this even just with drisa's recent blog post about headless drupal there's just tons of energy here and people are very hungry for that topic horizons is a new track that we've just added to our um selection of tracks and it's i think one that all of our sponsors have a way of contributing to um it is designed to help us think big and to really look at the edges of drupal and to talk about what that means so it's it's very it's a very interdisciplinary and track um it's about big ideas that really just don't fit in all the other tracks um really um kind of forward and future focused so track chairs are looking for sessions that focus on things like where front end meets back end and where the publishing platform meets application framework and it also focuses on publishing content to a distributed decoupled multi-channel web uh so there's just um lots of great opportunities here to share your ideas maybe um you have even started testing in some of these areas and want to talk about that maybe you have gone to other industry events or seeing trends in the industry and would like to share that and explain where you think drupal can fit in that i definitely see that with um kind of like internet of things and how drupal can power the can publish the content behind that um lots of lots of great opportunities here to um to explore uh another track is the php track it's obviously pretty popular because of the drupal 8 release uh this track is going to focus on making attendees better php developers because therefore they will be better drupal developers uh the track chairs are looking for intermediate to advanced sessions that obviously relate to php development software development as a whole rather than just drupal specific and uh concepts and techniques that they want discussed here should reference drupal use cases as much as possible uh so for those that have lots of experience in php or serving other php communities this is a great track for you to share your insights and kind of uh break us out of the the drupal um echo chamber and just really expand our knowledge here another track is project management uh i think this one's pretty straightforward uh the track chairs are looking for sessions that focus on the practices principles and tools that help make projects run better and faster um so session sessions should be tailored to project managers and directors scrum masters and other project management profiles i think that um drupal shops have tons of experience here can talk about what's worked what hasn't worked how they can scale business through really well managed projects um i think that software vendors that offer project management tools can really share best practices obviously you don't want to talk about your tool and how that necessarily helps um you can highlight that but you want to really um talk about the best practices um that your tools support we have a little multi-part question here that's come in if you have a moment okay sure all right so uh someone's asking if you have any guidance about whether proposing a topic that addresses multiple tracks is a good thing or a bad thing in the eyes of the selection committee and they're wondering is it better to be super focused on a given track or to appeal as many track audiences as possible oh that's that's good to know um well let's see when you submit for a track um i think you how do i answer this so if you submit for a track you want to be really clear who the audience is for so definitely be very specific don't try to go too broad don't write as if it could be accepted by multiple tracks what happens is if someone let's say you write for php uh the php track and uh the track lead says oh this is this is very good but it really actually doesn't fit mine it's much better for the code and developer track then uh that track chair will pass the submission over to the other track chair and say i'd like you to consider this one um so i hopefully that answers part a and then part b is it is absolutely fine to write as many submissions as you want um and again just be very clear that this is for this track and i'm covering this topic and it's for this audience um and again if you have questions that maybe have multiple ideas um for one specific track reach out to that track chair and they will give you guidance of the best way to submit great thanks man you bet okay so we're almost done um and again there's this is a lot of copy um and i specifically put a lot of copy on these pages so that when i email it to you you can read them um but they're also all on the website um but the site builder track is i think well it may not be obvious for everyone so we have a great um you know uh a great lion's share of our attendees who are non-technical and they build drupal websites and that's one of the beautiful things about drupal is you don't need to be technical to put all the lego pieces together to create that amazing website but they do need training to know how to make the best website possible so track chairs really are looking for sessions um that uh can highlight different modules um different ways to add features um new ways to approach um site building so best practices and i think this is a really i think every one of our sponsors can really contribute here so a drupal shop obviously a lot of you are building modules for clients and contributing them back so you might want to highlight something that's really new that a site builder should consider for their clients and um if you are a software vendor with a integration to drupal then you can highlight what's new with that module maybe you've upgraded to drupal 8 and it can help in a very specific way um to solve a client's problem so uh i think this is an area where all of our sponsors should really consider submitting and then the last one i wanted to highlight is the user experience track so obviously this track is for UX practitioners the track chairs are looking for sessions that cover a whole range of of topics from best practices for strategy and content creation all the way to design and development and so i'm trying to think what might apply most i think drupal shops probably have the a lot of experience here best practices i think a case study of what you've done with a client what work maybe some pitfalls maybe all the things that didn't work and what to watch out for those would be some really good topics to cover here so those are the tracks for new Orleans that are managed by the community process and if there aren't other questions then i will just go to the last type of track which is our business showcase and that is the sponsored sessions we have a bit of a follow-up uh to the question about involving community in the selection process okay uh and it was more asking if the greater drupal community i.e. you know conference attendees or everyone at the drupal.org account uh might be involved in the selection process oh uh no this is not um a big community process there is the track chairs who are deciding on which sessions get selected the track chairs being community members oh yes well they are community members right but we don't open it up for community voting okay thanks sure okay if there are not other questions then we'll just go into the business showcase so the business showcase is a track that runs throughout the whole conference at the same times as all the other sessions in the past a sponsor would be able to buy this by buying a sponsor package a diamond gets 60 minutes a platinum gets a 30 minute slot on the stage and gold would get a 15 minute lightning talk any of our sponsors can level up and pay for additional time on the stage it's obviously um the slots are limited so they do go quickly uh so that is a path that you want to take i recommend that you talk to your account manager right away because they are filling up there are a few slots left um the one thing i want to point out is uh as you notice with all of the community tracks there is not a track for case studies uh which is really popular and is what our attendees um really value and um and uh it's a great it's a great focus for our business showcase so we are asking anyone who speaks in the business showcase track to submit a case study um it also will help sponsors um really tell that story that we know resonates the best with our audience and will really attract um people to come and listen to you listen to you speak so again if you don't want to go through the community process that's okay i highly recommend it um you can do that and buy a session but either way this is the path you'd like to go please talk to your account manager now or shoot me an email and we'll let you know what's available so that's it and a nutshell um just to summarize it's important to start now know the tracks and the uh types of content that the track chairs are looking for you want to reach out right away to the track chairs and ask for their input on your ideas and be sure to reach out to other experts they're always have you know the open source ethos people are happy to contribute and help you create the best product possible uh when you write your abstract make sure it's detailed with a good story what's the problem what's the solution who is this for and make sure you highlight where you have spoken before so that you know that you have um experience speaking uh make sure you submit before the deadline so that way you can read people's comments you know you could even tweet uh to make sure that people see it's there and ask for people to comment and then you can use that feedback again to tweak your abstract up until the last minute again make sure you submit on time because we don't accept late submissions and uh again we is um the Drupal Association our resource for you uh you can reach out to me reach out to your account managers and if you are looking to find a partner to present with um ask us about partner connect and if you would like to buy a session reach out and we'll let you know all the details um on the right you can see account managers i'm sure you probably know who your account manager is in their email but i put it here just in case and um hopefully that really helps again you have until now and February 29th to submit your session submission and that concludes how to write a winning abstract uh are there any questions thanks Megan yeah we have had a comment and a question uh come in since i last interrupted you okay the first the comment was a little bit of a reply to uh the question about involving the community um and basically uh he's saying in the past we've had uh community voting on sessions but it didn't actually end up yielding the most helpful results um you know the part of the reason that we have the track chairs not is not just because they're you know content experts they also know what to look for as far as presenter skills um and so that is a pretty valuable resource that you can't necessarily get through a voting system um so that that was a bit of the comment um and then we had somebody ask a question here uh saying it seems like in the past there's been a preference for pretty narrow topics i.e issues with using twig for theming response of Drupal 8 sites versus general sites um like front end challenges with Drupal theming is there any truth to that that uh the narrower topics seem to be preferred huh that is a good question um you know i really can't speak to that but um brennan if you can pass that purse i can't see the who's asking questions but if you can connect me with them um i can definitely do some follow-up sure yeah i'm happy to connect um you with them and i'd also say that as you are thinking about your session and which track you want to speak to i would also suggest you ask that question of the track chair are they looking for something broader they're looking for something narrow um because they might have a personal preference of of what gives the most education right if you go deep or if you go a mile wide great well that is the end of the list of questions i have here okay great all right well thank you so much for your time i hope this helped it was the first time we gave this presentation so if you have feedback just let us know um and i will be sending the slides and the recording out to you shortly um and again you'll have our contact information and links to all the resources i mentioned so feel free to follow up with me and take advantage of all the information i've provided all right well thank you everyone for your time today