Submit a talk for GitHub Universe

The GitHub Universe 2016 call for proposals is open until July 31st, and we’re looking for 24 speakers to share their ideas in breakout sessions on September 14-15th. We encourage speakers with all levels of experience to apply, whether it’s your first talk or your fiftieth.

We believe that having a diverse group of speakers fosters a healthy community, stimulates conversation, and exposes fresh ideas. So we’re looking for speakers from different backgrounds, communities, and experiences. To make Universe accessible to a wide range of speakers, we provide an honorarium and travel accommodations to speakers. You can see all the details in the CFP description.

What we’re looking for

The 24 breakout sessions will explore a number of the personal and technical challenges involved in building software. We’re looking for sessions that examine the entire software development process: from before you start writing code, to writing and collaborating on code, through maintaining and scaling your code.

Whether you’re working on an open source project or on an enterprise software team (or both!), we all face similar challenges and we can learn how to overcome them together. You should submit a proposal if you want to share your experiences with:

• Workflow. How is software built today, and how will it be built tomorrow? What languages and tools are used, what processes, and what cultures? What is your workflow like, and how has your team been successful with it?
• Community. How do you start contributing to open source, and how do you grow a thriving software community? How has learning to code changed? What impact is openness having on public institutions? Which open source projects are having the largest impact on the software community?
• Business. What goes into building a modern software team? How can you contribute to, release, and maintain open source projects? What does it mean to use open source principles within your organization?
• Ecosystem. What are the tools you use to have a seamless development workflow? How do you deploy, monitor, and scale your code?

Helpful resources

If you’d like to submit but need some help organizing your ideas into a compelling proposal, check out Lucy Bain’s excellent blogpost about how to get the creative juices flowing.

Already have an idea but need to streamline it into a great proposal? Take a look at CodeConf LA speaker E. Dunham’s post about the 7 essential parts of a complete abstract..

Already have a proposal ready? What are you waiting for? Submit now, don’t wait until July 31!

Written by

Kelsey Schimmelman

@kelseyschimm