Our Call for Proposals is now closed, our speakers selected, and the schedule is now live

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Call for Proposals (CFP)

We’re happy to consider any talk which will be interesting and relevant to an audience of Python developers at any level of expertise or experience.

The 2019 Call for Presentations (CFP) was open from Wednesday, April 3 Anywhere On Earth (AoE) to Sunday, May 5 AoE.

Please note that talk acceptance does not include financial assistance to attend the conference. If you require assistance with the costs of travelling to the conference and staying in Sydney during the conference, you must submit a separate financial aid application through our financial aid page.

Talk details

We’re mostly looking for 30 minute talks on everything Python, open source, and tech-related. Want to share something cool? We want to hear from you! We welcome submissions from everybody, including those who’ve never spoken before or are relatively new to Python.

PyCon AU attracks a diverse set of attendees so we’re looking for a mix of talks which are beginner friendly as well as talks which provide real value to seasoned professionals. If you’ve got some prior speaking experience and you’d like to present on a more advanced or deeper technical topic, you might like to submit a Deep Dive talk. You get extra time and (as long as it’s labelled clearly) you can assume the audience to have relevant prior knowledge and expertise.

Talk topics for the main conference can be anything, but on the Friday of the conference we have four specialist tracks. For these tracks we are specifically looking for talks about Education, Django, Security and Privacy, and Science and Data. Talks for all topics go through the same submission process but you can flag your talk for a specific track if you want.

You can submit a proposal for the main conference, and all of our four Specialist Tracks on our talk submission site.

Mentors

In order to support speakers, we offer mentorship and feedback to those who would like it.

A mentor is an experienced presenter who has volunteered to help other presenters prepare a submission and their talk. For first-time presenters, non-native English speakers, under-confident or uncertain speakers, or anyone who would just appreciate another set of eyes, our mentors are here to help.

If you would like some help from a mentor, you can reach out to them directly:

Each mentor’s email has been split up to prevent automated crawling. Please do not abuse the ability to directly contact our mentors.

Helpful Tips

Have fun brainstorming some talk ideas, to help out this public speaking repository, maintained by VM Brasseur, has many useful resources to help you polish your proposals and talks.

Our submission process is anonymous. This means our first-round reviewers will not know anything about your identity while assessing your proposal. Please avoid including identifying information like your name or your pronouns (he/she/they) anywhere in your proposal so that our reviewers can assess your talk by itself. If you add such details, please be advised that our CFP curators will edit all identifying information from your submissions before the reviewing process begins.

Make sure to read our anonymity FAQ before your final submission! This FAQ contains important tips on what “anonymous” looks like, and provides information on our review process.

All speakers will be expected to have read and adhere to the conference Code of Conduct. In particular for speakers: slide contents and spoken material should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate, and neither are language or imagery that denigrate or demean people based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical appearance, disability, or body size.

Financial support

Speakers whose talks are accepted will receive one free ticket to PyCon AU. You are welcome to propose a talk with more than one speaker, but please be aware that if it is accepted, only one complimentary ticket will be allocated.

We do not automatically provide travel and accommodation to speakers but don’t let finances stop you from submitting a talk proposal. As well as free conference tickets for speakers, there is further financial assistance available based on need, and speakers are given priority for this assistance. See the financial assistance page for more details about the selection process and a link to the application form.