We give speakers the choice to either speak live or send us a pre-recorded session. Consider what would work best for your session goals.

• Pre-recorded session and live Q&A - during the session speaker interacts with audience in chat
• Pre-recorded first half, second half live with the audience interaction
• Live session - speaker can recruit their colleagues to help them out with the audience interaction

A talk is where you talk using slides and demos to an audience that listens. A talk is either 25 minutes (including 5 minutes Q&A) or 50 minutes (including 10 minutes Q&A) long, make sure you reserve time at the end for Q&A. If speakers wish to continue with the Q&A after their time slot, there will be a dedicated place for it. Feel free to recruit your colleagues to interact with people in chat while you are talking. A talk has one primary speaker, optionally another (secondary) speaker.

A talk should be bite-sized and focused on a certain topic. This means that you should not expect to be able to cover multiple broad areas in one talk. You can submit more than one proposal, to cover a set of topics, but we cannot guarantee their final scheduled order. Therefore, we recommend topics be structured in a way so as to minimize their interdependence so that they do not need to be presented in a specific order.

We give speakers a choice to speak live or send us a pre-recorded session. We understand pre-recording your session requires extra time and extra set of skills and we are currently considering ways to make it easier for you. If you choose to pre-record your session, remember it only needs to be as good as you would do live. This is not a Hollywood movie :)

A discussion is a bit where you lead/moderate a discussion with a group of knowledgeable panelists where they answer prepared questions or questions from the audience as selected by you for appropriateness to your topic and session’s goal. It is more interactive than a talk because you could engage with the audience during the session. If you are willing to open the discussion to attendees, consider holding a fishbowl discussion where you start with a group of speakers and an empty “seat” which could be filled by active audience members in the course of a discussion.

A discussion is 50 minutes long. If speakers wish to continue after the 40-minute slot, there will be a dedicated place for it. A discussion has a dedicated moderator and up to 5 active speakers.

Discussions are delivered live. We do not accept pre-recorded discussions.

Meetups and booths are open to all participants, they serve as a place for open discussions, sharing the latest project developments and interaction with contributors and attendees.

We recognize that adjusting booths and meetups to the virtual environment is very challenging and we are considering steps we can take to ensure high meetup and booth traffick. We are working on a list of suggestions for virtual booths and meetups. We are open to working together with booth staff and meetup organizers in order to find the best possible solution in the virtual environment.

We hope to release the schedule by August 2021.

We receive a large number of high quality submissions. We hope to send out acceptances by mid July 2021

We have put together a document with guidelines on how to write a good proposal. You can ping us on the #cfp-help channel on our discord server with further questions.

Admission to DevConf.US is free and only requires that you register. Registration details will be available by August 2021.

We use registration to manage several logistics issues around DevConf.US, most importantly our virtual platform requires registration

Yes, please indicate on the CfP submission if you'll be co-presenting. If you'd like to add a co-speaker to a submission or an accepted session, no worries! Please email us at info@devconf.us with your update.

We will be publishing our schedule there and having your preferred email address for that service lets us give you some editing rights for your session. Some speakers may use a different address for sched.org so we want to collect that from them. If you don’t have a preference or don’t have one already, just provide any email address you read and we will do the rest.

Yes! We have put together steps on how to record an awesome video with the open source software OBS. The steps can be found here.

These are the audio & video requirements:

Video Format: MP4

Video Frame Rate: 30 fps

Video Frame Size: 960x540 (you can make it higher resolution if you'd like)

Video Bit Rate: 1000kbps

Audio Format: AAC

Audio Channels: 2

Audio Sample Rate: 44100

Audio Bit Rate: 128kbps

The talk is more engaging if the audience can see you presenting, so we highly recommend overlaying your video on the slides in the video recording. Checkout out the video recording guidelines for information on how to do this!

We recommend uploading the video to YouTube as unlisted. Once you have uploaded your video, go to 'accepted proposals' on the cfp site to submit the link to your recorded video.

If you would prefer to not to use YouTube, send the organizers an email at info@devconf.us and we will work with you to figure out alternate options.

Yes! When you confirm your session acceptance, you will be asked whether you would like to have a speaker coach and will be matched with one.

The speaker confirmation form invites new speakers to sign up for practicing their talks via a video conference ahead of DevConf.US and invites experienced speakers to coach new speakers through such practice. We hope that participating in this program will improve the experience of new speakers and improve the quality of talks at DevConf.US, and highly encourage experienced speakers to sign up as coaches. We have a speaker guide and a speaker coaching guide available to support speakers and coaches. People who sign up, will receive their coaching matches by mid July 2021, with the expectation that they will schedule practice sessions between mid July 2021 and mid August 2021.

We ask the coaches to take the lead on scheduling the practice session via a video conference (BlueJeans, Talky.io, Jitsi Meet, Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, etc). The speaker can choose to invite other audience members to the practice. In the practice session, the speaker delivers their practice talk, and the coach and other audience members provide feedback on the talk and slide deck.

Speakers and coaches agree to abide by the DevConf Code of Conduct both during the conference and in any pre-conference coaching, practice, or other program related activities.

Yes. Our intention is to record every talk and make it available on YouTube and via a live-stream. If this is a problem, please contact us at info@devconf.us as soon as possible so we can determine if we can accommodate your request.

In past years, we've offered diversity scholarships and coaching for new speakers. We'll be offering programs for our virtual event, also. We will pair coaches with new speakers to help with presentation content as well as video production. This option will be available on the acceptance notification. More details on this and other efforts will be added to our site in the near future.

Yes! When you register for the event, you will be asked whether you would like to be a coach or an apprentice and what topics you have experience in or are interested in. Coaches and apprentices will then receive their matches via email. We always get a lot of interest from people to be coached, and encourage people who have attended more than ten technology conferences to sign up as coaches. If you have attended fewer than three technology conferences, please consider signing up as an apprentice.

1. Ensuring that apprentices have a friendly contact who can orient them to attending an open source technical conference, and particularly one that is virtual. Additionally, introducing apprentices to ideas and skills that will be useful at future in-person conferences, such as how to find and participate in the hallway track.
2. Offering apprentices an opportunity to learn more about the topics they are interested in, be introduced to open source projects they might like to get involved in, and possibly receive advice that might be helpful for their career.

Because there will not be as many opportunities to physically point out things in real time such as the hallway track, the coaching program will offer practical advice around those areas as a supplement to the main goal of helping new attendees navigate this new virtual event.

Apprentices will be paired with coaches, with our best efforts being made to pair apprentices with coaches who have experience with one or more of the technical topics apprentices selected a preference for when registering. The coach will contact the apprentice prior to the conference to arrange a virtual meeting prior to attending the conference via a video conference (BlueJeans, Talky.io, Jitsi Meet, Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, etc) or a voice call. This meeting will give you a chance to exchange introductions, answer any questions the apprentice has as they prepare to attend the conference, learn about the apprentice's career goals, review the conference schedule together, and plan to attend some sessions together. During the conference, you will be invited to meet other apprentices and coaches. The coaching includes helping show apprentices how to participate in the virtual conference.