How-To

How to get your talk accepted for the next OpenStack Summit

What’s new and time-tested tips for the July 17 deadline.

July 11, 2018
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If you’re interested in sharing knowledge with fellow Stackers, you’re in good company: there are usually more than 1,500 submissions for the OpenStack Summit. All community members are encouraged to submit, here are a few tips to improve the chances that your pitch is picked.

Here’s what’s new along with some time-tested tips on what the selection members are looking for. The deadline to submit your presentation for the Berlin Summit is July 17.

At the Vancouver Summit, we focused on open infrastructure integration as the Summit has evolved over the years to cover more than just OpenStack. Over 30 different projects from the open infrastructure community joined, including Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, OpenShift and many more.

The tracks were organized around specific use cases and will remain the same for Berlin, with the addition of hands-on workshops as a dedicated track. Submit presentations about the open infrastructure tools you’re using, as well as the integration work needed to address these use cases. The more the merrier: you’re also encouraged to invite peers from other open source communities to speak and collaborate.

The tracks:

• CI/CD
• Container infrastructure
• Edge computing
• HPC / GPU / AI
• Open source community
• Private and hybrid cloud
• Public cloud
• Telecom and NFV
• Hands-on workshops

Voting process

Community voting opens shortly after the deadline.  After that, a Programming Committee for each track will build the schedule. Programming Committees are made up of individuals from a variety of open-source communities working in open infrastructure, in addition to people who’ve participated in the past.

Landing a talk

Here are a few tips to make your proposal stand out from the pack from veteran speaker Beth Cohen, cloud networking product manager at Verizon.

  • No matter how wonderful you think your innovation is,  product pitch presentations are highly discouraged.
  • Speakers are encouraged to demonstrate past experience with making presentations and speaking to large audiences. If you do not have prior speaking experience, consider participating on a panel.
  • Make the proposal compelling. The community is always interested in real user stories – good and bad, new innovations and details about technical contributions to OpenStack components and of course, the platform itself.
  • Provide any relevant links to additional information, such as code repositories, case studies, papers, blog posts, etc.

More details on designing a successful OpenStack Summit submission can be found in this post from a Women of OpenStack video webinar hosted by Niki Acosta, Anne Gentle and Diane Mueller.

Or you can check out this podcast from the Women of OpenStack.

The deadline for submissions is July 17.

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