This year, all sessions will be pre-recorded. If your submission is chosen, you'll be asked to confirm your acceptance. Once you confirm your acceptance, you are expected to submit a video recording of your session by July 27.

We are still working out some details, but our plan is for each speaker to be available for Q&A at the end of their scheduled session time.

We are planning to include a day of live, virtual workshops on 23 September 2020. The CfP for workshops closes on 8 July 2020 to allow plenty of time to work out the logistics of the workshops.

Only confirm your acceptance for the sessions you will submit videos for. There is a maximum of 3 videos allowed per speaker. Once you confirm, we will expect to receive your video by July 27.

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.

The pre-recorded sessions should be no longer than 35 minutes. There will be 10 minutes of live Q&A after each session. The speakers are required to be present during the whole 45 minutes of their sessions to answer any questions that come up.

We hope to release the schedule around August 17, 2020.

We are planning to host workshops on 23 September 2020, then sessions on 24 September and end on 25 September. These dates may change slightly, so do watch for the final schedule.

We receive a large number of high quality submissions. With the pivot to virtual this year, we have already sent out a first round of acceptance notifications. We expect to send out acceptances throughout the open CfP, to allow for as much time as possible for our presenters to confirm and prepare their videos by July 27.

Our track teams will review your video submissions as they come in. We may, on a case-by-case basis, ask for you to update your video if we find a problem (technical or otherwise). We will provide guidelines for how to record and submit your video, we'll be adding information to this site in the days ahead.

Admission to DevConf.US is free and only requires that you register. Registration details should be available around August 17, 2020.

We use registration to manage several logistics issues around DevConf.US. We've never planned a virtual conference before!!

We want to ensure we've chosen the right platform for our sessions, chats, booths, and workshops based on the registration numbers.

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

We recommend uploading the video to YouTube as unlisted. We will send out an email with instructions on how to submit the YouTube link of your 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 July 22, with the expectation that they will schedule practice sessions between July 27 and August 14.

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.

We're excited for our first Virtual DevConf.US. We hope you'll be patient with us as we work out the details, together. Please email us at info@devconf.us with any other questions and especially any ideas you have!

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.