How to Propose a Talk?

For general proposal calling information, see Call for Proposals.

First of all, thank you for your interest in speaking at PyCon APAC 2022! The following will help you submit a successful proposal. In the following, we will provide tips to make your proposal strong and informative to increase the chance of your proposal to be accepted.

What’s your topic?
Who is your target audience?
What will the audience gain after listening to your talk?
How will you structure your talk to keep it within the time limit?

You will be asked to fill the following fields in your proposal:

Title
Category
Duration
Language
Abstract
Python Level
Objective
Detailed Description (optional)
Outline (optional)
Supplementary (optional)
Recording Release
First time speaker
Slide Link (optional)
Referral policy
Preferred event time
Living in Taiwan

Hmmm, that might seem a lot, but if you skip all optional fields, it would only take you about 500 letters to write your proposal. We would still like to encourage you to complete the entire form to help reviewers better understand your proposal.

Some of the fields are for proposal reviewers only, so there is no need to worry about spoilers:

Objectives
Outline
Supplementary

If you are an experienced speaker, you can directly enter the My PyCon page to start working on your proposal!

If this is your first time submitting a talk proposal or don’t quite understand how PyCon talks are structured, read on for more detailed advice.

Topics and General Advice

To help you pick a topic that will be suitable for PyCon APAC 2022, you can first find out the accepted talks from the previous PyCon APAC and PyCon Taiwan:

Good Ideas

The abstract or detailed description should answer all of the following questions:
- Who is the intended audience?
- What should they know before the talk?
- Is there any special domain knowledge required?
- What will they get after my talk?
The abstract and the content of the talk should be related to the title of the talk.
Talk content must be original and not replicated from some other talks. Please let the reviewer understand which part of your talks contain original content developed by you.
Outline major sections of your talk along with the estimated time you will spend in each of these sections.
If you feel that your topic will not be familiar to most Pythonistas, be sure to provide additional references such as links to wiki, source codes, or materials that will help them better understand your talk.

Bad Ideas

Avoid infomercials.
- Try not to focus on selling your products or introduce how to use them in your talk. However, we do welcome talks about how your company solved a problem previously or how your open source project can be useful to the attendees.
Don’t assume that everyone in the review committee knows who you are. Always submit a complete proposal with all the information that you are able to provide.
Avoiding plagiarism. We welcome all forms of sharing, but it should be clear which sections are original and which are citations from previous work.

How to Choose the Python Level?

It is very important for you to choose an appropriate Python level for your talk.

Your talk won’t be readily accepted because it is either super hard or deadly simple. Its acceptance correlates with the specified Python level and your targeted audience.

If your talk is designed for Python beginners and you are sharing about your Python learning experience and how you solved some tricky issues you face, then it is a good proposal with content suitable for the right audience group. It will not be a good idea to share about how to inspect Python’s memory usage and GC systems together in a talk for beginners learning Python.

Talks that have mismatched audience groups (like topics above) are easy for the committee to decide. However, most topics lie somewhere in between and it will be hard for the committee to decide. Therefore, do have a look at the following description to help you find the right audience level for your talk.

Novice

People who have little to no Python knowledge. One can expect them to have basic knowledge about Python syntax and control flow (e.g. if-else, for loops; functions), but the audience will not not understand every module in stdlib, nor the concepts of tricky variables visible scope and OOP (and MRO inheritance).

Sharing your experience learning Python, or how you lead a community are suitable for an audience at this level. Generally, a talk about non-stdlib Python packages, such as pandas or Django, is not suitable for novices, unless they are able to learn and master all the concepts from just your talk alone.

Intermediate

The possible applications are more diverse than novice talks. Intermediate talks are for those who have learned how Python works and wish to know more about how it can be used in various different tasks. Suitable talk topics include setting up web frameworks, working with databases, monitoring web traffic, auto trading in the stock market, and so on.

From our past experience, around half of the talks will fall into this category. Note that we may contact you to adjust your talk for the novice or experienced audience groups based on your proposal.

Experienced

People coming to experienced talks already have a good proficiency in Python (or programming in general).

The main difference between intermediate and experienced talks is that experienced talks assume more domain knowledge about the talk topic. For example, talks about performance optimization and the internals of how a module works should be at this level.