Call for Proposals

Do you want to share your experience and expertise? PyCon Australia 2012 is looking for proposals to fill the conference presentation tracks. The PyCon Australia conference days will be Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 August in Hobart, Tasmania.

Presentation subjects may range from reports on open source, academic or commercial projects to tutorials and case studies. As long as a presentation is interesting and potentially useful to the Python community, it will be considered for inclusion in the program.

We're especially interested in short presentations that will teach conference-goers something new and useful. Can you show attendees how to use a module? Explore a Python language feature? Package an application? We'd love to hear from you!

If you have any questions, please review the information below or contact the PyCon Australia Program Committee at <program@pycon-au.org>.

Important Dates

Call for Proposals opens: February 22, 2012
Proposal submission deadline: May 4, 2012
Proposal acceptance: May 18, 2012

Speaker Benefits

Speakers are eligible for free conference registration and a free seat at the conference dinner.

You will not be automatically registered; you will need to register yourself and failure to do so may result in loss of your talk slot(s).

Talk Format

The preferred length for talks is 30 minutes. You can request a 45-minute extended slot, but proposals requiring 45 minutes will be reviewed more stringently. 45-minute slots are, as a rule of thumb, reserved for how-to talks rather than talks about things you made, saw, or did.

An Open Space room will also be available for follow-up sessions.

Session lengths include time for audience questions. You should budget at least five minutes for questions; for example, a 30-minute talk will be 25 minutes of presentation and 5 minutes of questions.

Presentation Recording

We hope to record presentations again this year, though this is pending sponsorship support and not confirmed.

If you do not wish to have your talk recorded the please note this in your submission. Doing so will not influence the selection process in any way.

How to Submit

Use the PyCon Australia Online Proposal Submission system to send us your proposals. You must first create an account on the website (and be logged in) in order to submit a proposal.

The primary author should submit the proposal. Additional authors can be added to a proposal on request (they must have accounts too).

The proposal must include the following:

Talk title.
Duration/Type: choose 30 minutes for most talks, 45 minutes for extended talks or Tutorial.
Abstract:
- Public abstract for website and programme.
- Private notes for reviewers.
Target Skill Level: indicate the intended audience and difficulty level: Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced. Add more detail in the summary and/or description, such as specific experience required.
Project details: If applicable provide information about the project related to your proposal.
Further information about yourself
- Biography to appear on the website and programme.
- Your experience: This will only appear to reviewers.

Submit a proposal now!

Paper Publication

If you wish to publish a paper to accompany your presentation we have organised to produce a Proceedings as an unrefereed volume of The Python Papers Monograph

We would prefer that papers for standard length talks (30 minutes) be no more than 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins and papers for long talks (45 minutes) be no more than 10 pages. Appropriate file formats include any file that can be read with Open Office (which includes plain text and HTML with minimal mark-up) or a PDF viewer. Slides (even those accompanied by speaker notes) will not be printed in the proceedings.

Authors wishing to submit a paper must do so before the conference runs. The volume will be published after the conference runs.