 Let's start. Hello everyone again. This is the session for open source education track and it's my pleasure to welcome here our speakers who will share the insights into how sessions are being selected for a conference and what are the common mistakes that people usually make when submitting the talks. So if you want to know some tips on how to increase the chance that your next session will be accepted you are at the right place. So before I will hand it over to Tomas in case you will have any questions during the session feel free to use the Q&A section but also I would like to encourage you to fill the polls you can see two polls so if you can fill them we will be more than happy and then I will be sharing the results. So now Tomas it's yours. Okay thank you Nera for a very nice introduction you said it very well so welcome all and thank you for joining us and sorry that you had to leave the coffee tasting so we really appreciate it it was an awesome session so I really hope that at the end of this presentation you'll know like how to write our titles and especially abstract for conferences so that your talks will be accepted. So my name is Tomas and I'm a speaker of many conferences such as Defcon for Red Hat Summit Ansible Fest and I also will review talks for Defcon CZ for past few years and today Slanka with me which I'm really excited that we are two were able to do this presentation so Lenny please tell us something about yourself. Thanks Tomas and hello everybody my name is Lenka Bocinsova and I'm more on the organizer side of the events I'm also Red Hatter where I organize many internal events and where I need to review many different talks and sometimes we need to reject them and so I hope that during this presentation we will give you some tips so we will not need to reject so many talks so let's see what we can do about it but before we start as Nera mentioned we have some questions for you because we were checking the attendees list and we could see some really experienced speakers on the list but we would like to see if we have also some people who never submitted talk for the conference or you know like you are planning to do so and the second question would be maybe curiosity for you like what percentage of talk do you think that get accepted for Defcon we will get back to this post during the presentation and now I will hand it over to Tomas to tell us some behind the scenes of the reviewing talks. Okay I'll do that so actually this session I actually submitted this session for this year's Defcon as like aftermath of reviewing many talks so to give you guys a little bit of insight how it's being done so as you know conferences are driven around deadlines there's a deadline for CFP there is deadline for announcing results and what will happen and there's even more deadlines internally for us reviewers or even organizers to prepare the venue or or have the first round of like reviews so that we know like what's like what and where and given these deadlines we need to go through like hundreds of sessions so for example if you are staring at your monitor for a few hours you are at your hundredth session like the fatigue is kicking in so it's getting like really tiring at some point to read so many abstracts and get reading yet another talk about guide ops or open shift so it's like it can be really stressful but thankfully we have a group of people who review each track so this is specifically for Defcon CZ I know that other conferences do it probably differently but we usually have a track captain who works with the organizer and the track committee which is a group of people and we review the track or the sessions for a track together and then we have a prioritized list of talks you'd like to see on the conference and I would say this is a very nice process where we discuss we talk together we usually see like groups of talks which are similar so we try to pick one or two but at the end of the day we always think about like what talks will be like best fit for the conference what talks will get most audience or like best most questions so this is like always on our mind thinking about like what would be the best talk for this track for this session so if you have like talk which is very specific or or only like targets small amount of people it might not be accepted because we think that it's like it wouldn't get many attendance so those are some insights we'll speak more as the talk continues and I'll hand it over to Leica yeah thank you so much and before we jump to the next slide just one question come to my mind you as a reviewer do somehow interact with people who are submitting talks for the conference and maybe the people in the audience can give us also some experience that you have with submitting the talk oh yeah so I actually really liked it on this year's devcom before the CFP started we did an event where we did a Q&A for people who would like to speak and there were a few people who joined and asked questions and had ideas for their sessions so that was really great and we were able to like tailor their ideas towards devcom so that it would be a good fit for the conference so I strongly encourage everyone to do this like when you have an idea for a talk before you submit it like reach out to the organizers and also usually like after the CFP is done people are curious if their talk will be accepted or not so they are like asking questions perfect thanks so much yeah so so now you know something about the reviewing process and I would say that it's it's similar when we are going to the conference and right like picking the talks that we want to attend right we have here the devcom schedule in front of us we have many titles many tracks and there is so many talks but the main difference from the reviewer perspective is that the reviewer will really need to go through many more submissions that actually ended up on the on the schedule and now I'm checking the poll of the results and we have people who think that most of the people think that 35 percent of talks get accepted for the devcom then there are seven votes for 45 percent get accepted and it's a little bit changing and then one vote for 55 and you are actually right because for this year devcom and I would say it might be also for a previous one it's only 35 percent talks that usually get accepted we receive this year around 400 submissions which is which only 140 talks get accepted but when we have in-person events so usually there is much more the numbers of submissions is doubled I would say even and so there is one simple thing that I guess like when you are thinking about the title or about the abstract then you're tall so there are these you can help the reviewers to do so and improve the process of writing really good title and the abstract because this is how you sell yourself not just to the reviewers but also to the attendees and this simple question can help you to lead through the submissions right so really mention don't forget about what is the talk about the most really important thing then really mention for whom you are going to talk right for for whom it can be beneficial and the third thing the outcome so what those people who will be attending your talk will learn from from you right so what you are promising them to learn so if you if you keep this into your in your mind when you are thinking about the submission I think it will really improve the process but we will give you many more tips but before we jump to it I'm looking if we have any questions in the Q&A section yeah I was checking it and we have none seems like we have very experienced crowd here okay yeah I can I can see that many people have also experienced already with submitting talks to the conferences which is really good but we have some people also who who've never never submitted talk for the conference so so we are great we are glad to see that and now we can move to the next slide so Tomás, I hand it over to you okay thank you so if you have any ideas or tips please share that with us in chat so we can discuss and at the end of the presentation we should have a short Q&A okay so let's talk about five common mistakes we saw in this year's Defconv CZ submissions and before I start talking about them or we actually you can see that the example talk here is about growing bananas and it was actually kind of a joke or like a placeholder I put in the slides but like I found it really funny so we stick to it but originally we wanted to do like a real talk we would actually do so let's grow some bananas and I guess the mistake number one is the length of the abstract and here we can see both extremes on the left side the abstract is just one sentence and as a reviewer to be honest I like to see these ones because they're like instant decline like there is nothing to review we have no idea what the talk is about so we can't judge it in any way so that's clear and that side it's the exact opposite is that when someone writes like a small novel about the talk and it takes a lot of time to read it process it and trying to figure out what the talk is about so I guess it's good because it means that the person who submitted really cares but at the same time it feels like overwhelming so if the talk is meant to be overwhelming as well I'm not sure if want to have overwhelming talks so it's really questionable so the advice here is please write the abstract with the length which is just right like not too short but also not too long but I think Lenka has an idea here about long abstracts as well yes sometimes sometimes it happened that people just put the link to the abstract and you know they they expect that we will read their blog post which is like pretty long as well so avoid doing this like replacing the abstract field with your blog post because imagine 400 submissions from the past so we don't have that much time to to go through this so yeah that's that's my advice here okay thank you Lenny okay next bucket here we are jumping about like quality of the submission and the first part is about passwords and acronyms so if you think that your abstract is not catchy enough so like you put some buzzwords in it and maybe even acronyms so that looks pro yeah it doesn't look pro it's like it actually has the exact opposite effect it just means that you are either lazy or we are not sure if the talk is like practical because here in Defconn we are looking for very practical talks we usually want sessions which are either about technology or some topic and then people can really have some outcome from the session and start using the technology or the project right away so if you have abstract full of buzzwords it probably means it's not very practical so we really don't like to see such talks here and for acronyms I mean it's fine to use them in your abstract but please explain them like if they are at least like not very common like if you think at least one person in the crowd wouldn't know them please explain them like what they stand for okay more speaking more about quality is about like unclear titles or even abstracts so the title is the most important thing of your talk as Lenka showed earlier when people are like browsing the schedule they only see the title and if the title is not catchy or like not clear they would just like skip over and go to next one so please take the extra time to think about the title so it's like catchy but very clear and like it's like few words about your session and when when people open your submission and start reading about the abstract like if you have grammar errors there or the structure is chaotic or unclear yeah it doesn't like sell very well your session especially for us for reviewers it just means that someone like wrote it very quickly and clicked send so they probably didn't think about it much like advice here is like you can use some tools to check the abstract like for grammar errors or for like improve the grammar overall and then maybe share it with your friends because that's what you end up doing anyway you just write it down and send it to somewhere you don't even know who is going to judge it review it but even though you're friends you know that they care about you so if you share your their session or title and abstract with them they can give you like very good advices so that it's more clear more understandable and Lenka would like I hope that Lenka would like to share some more tips next sure thing yeah so we are moving a little bit from the bananas we have the kitty everybody likes kitties right so and this is important point of when you are thinking about your submissions so really keep in mind what is the conference about and do some research when you are submitting the talk and what what different tracks people have or the conference have because sometimes it happens that we see the the abstract which is not really related to the conferences or we can see that people are putting it into the wrong track and what happened when you put it into the wrong track is that as Tomas mentioned at the beginning different people are assigned to the different tracks based on their knowledge and for example if you put it to the wrong track that can mean that this person doesn't have that knowledge and they will automatically somehow skip this talk or you know can be rejected because of this so try to keep this in your mind and when you are not sure so really contact the organizers and they are happy to help you and the the last common mistake that we have here is that really you compete with others we many times see the submissions on the same topic and we have like you know like 10 10 similar topics for for the same topic so so really keep in mind that you can group with some colleagues for example or friends right ask them hey i'm going to talk about this this topic please maybe you can join me or maybe they are already planning to submit the similar topics so you can group with them and the other thing is also to research the other conferences what people are talking about is there already some presentation on this topic so maybe you can put different point of view on that so really really focus on doing some research before the submitting and i think we are running out of the time but we would like to just summarize some of the talks and show it on one abstract that we can see so really the length as we mentioned is really important and try to try to be as short as possible but answering all the important questions then invite the colleagues to present with you right as here in the example there is robert and chain i am with tomash today presenting it's much easier for me to even present when i'm the new speaker and the the third thing match the abstract with the title uh that is really something that's uh it's important and tomash the the last three things okay some more outcomes uh so yeah as lenka said please make sure that you are submitting your session for the right track uh this happened for this year they've gone for plenty of talk that they were misplaced so we had to put them in the correct track but we might actually forgot some or did not understand the submission so before you click submit please read about the tracks so that you understand like what exactly is meant to be in them if you are not clear like you can always contact the organizers of the conference also as i said if you are using some ax acronyms and then none they are not very common please explain them and the most important thing as lenka said earlier but i'd like to repeat it so in your abstract please make sure to describe what your talk is about who is the target audience meaning like who is supposed to attend it and finally like what will that they get out of the talk meaning what will what will be their takeaway so when they finish uh with your talk like how will their life be better after seeing you speaking and that's it uh this is our session we are right on time i mean you couldn't even rehearse this so thank you so much for all the comments in the chat i wasn't even able to keep up reading them and we can answer some questions now thanks so we have three questions so far in the q and a section so let me mention the first one you mentioned that only 35 percentage of submitted tools get get accepted for def conf this year is this number common for other conferences or is it specific for def conf and what does this number depend on uh when do like to answer it or should i i can i can go uh so i would say um it's pretty common for the conferences to have this number uh like 35 this is specific for def conf we have it in internal events as well but this really depends on the structure of the event and how many uh numbers of slot people have uh on the schedule or organizers have so so it can really vary and also it depends on the um uh number of submissions i can see that during the virtual events there is some virtual fatigue so we can see like less uh submissions um but i would say the percentage is pretty stable so tomas do you have something to add um maybe just to reiterate that uh for popular topics they receive so many talks that we cannot accept all of them only a handful for a specific uh topic so for example open shift there are so many open shift talks being submitted for def conf and this is not open shift con this is def conf so we only accept a like a dozen or a few dozens so the rest needs to be declined uh that's another reason mm-hmm thank you both very much another question if we work on a very specific topic how can we make a talk that is accepted bearing in mind that the audience is likely to be small i guess i can take that one uh well you can make it more introductory so like if it's very specific and you know the audience will be small also the question is like is it worth for the small audience to like hear talking or would it be better to write a blog post or maybe write some documentation and share it with the folks but if you would like to speak about it maybe make it more introductory so that you can attach bigger crowd and maybe introduce the technique or the project to a bigger audience okay thank you another question are the quality of the presentation or present their skills taken taken into the consideration to choose between similar submissions well yeah i guess it's yeah plenty please start okay uh so i would say that um so usually for example for def conf we are really uh encourage the new speakers to to submit the talks for the conferences and we are taking it uh into the consideration during the during the reviewing process but it doesn't mean that that's the only thing that we are looking at right if uh if your submission your title and your abstract is really not selling as much so um you know your skill level uh is not something that will convince us but if we have for example a really experienced speaker there and last experienced speaker and we see that the submissions are really nicely written both of them so i would say that we can prioritize the the one uh that is with the like the new speaker but maybe tamash you can add something yeah i agree i would say something similar that we actually also try to do blind review for def conf that for the first week of reviewing we don't even see the names of the speakers so that we really go for the quality of the submission and not for yeah this is from this person we know uh she's very good so we are accepting her immediately thank you another question can you share your views on blind versus non-blind cfps and would you have different recommendations for submissions depending on whether the cfps is blind or not that's a good question right yeah i don't personally have an easy answer like i personally like blind cfps uh that we don't know who the speaker is so that we really go for the quality of the submission uh yeah i would say yeah most of the conferences we have the similar approaches so like we have a blind blind one first and then uh we go to the like check the speakers so um but there are no like preferences because i guess each of these options have some pros and cons right so because sometimes it can say that hey i know the speaker from that conference uh and he like from last year for example but and talking about the same topic so so we want to avoid this so the name can help but yeah i would say i don't have preferences uh unfortunately we're running out of the time but we have another four three uh questions so let me just put the last one and the others please just move to the work adventure platform where you can discuss and continue discussion so the last question are there any uh anti patterns that you find typical or frequent uh submitters well actually uh when we were doing the blind reviews for dev conf uh the first week i would always be able to recognize submission from dan walsh because he writes very short and straight to the point very clear speaking about containers so i immediately knew like yeah this is dan walsh but i wouldn't say it's anti pattern it's just like everyone has their own style of writing or like everyone is specific and if you see someone submitting every year for a few years you can already recognize the writing style or or the way the talk is submitted or or the topic okay i'm so sorry to interrupt you unfortunately the time is over so please uh move to the work adventure uh to continue the discussion and lenny thomas thank you very much for your presentation it was great thank you yeah thank you nori and thank you all for joining thank you so much see you in the work and yeah see you there