Are you registered for ICONUK 2014 yet? Tim Clark is running the event this year, but we still need speakers. It’s that time of year again when we ask you to throw your hat into the ring if you want to speak at ICONUK. I’m running the Dev track, and I just thought it would be useful to run through the process of how we choose the sessions.
Firstly I move all of the session titles and abstracts into a spreadsheet and remove any names from the list to try and avoid falling into the trap of automatically selecting “the old dependables”. Just to give an idea, last year we had nearly three times as many abstracts as we had sessions, so this next bit of the process is very hard. We go through the abstracts and we rate each one so that there is a league table.
Next we add in the speaker names. We try our best to get as many speakers in as possible, so if someone has played a blinder and submitted multiple abstracts which we like, we’ll either pick the best one and remove the others, or contact them to see if maybe they could speak with someone else, ideally someone new to the speaking circuit.
After much arguing and horse trading with the other tracks (sometimes we can stretch the definition of Infrastructure or Dev or Management!) we end up with a list and we’ll send out the notification emails.
And that’s where the real fun starts for you!
So please do have a think about whether you want to try out presenting in a smaller, less terrifying setting than Florida. The Call For Abstracts closes on Monday 30th June and we’ll aim to let people know as soon after that as possible.
