Simon Willison's Weblog: call-for-proposals

PyCon US 2026 call for proposals is now open

2025-11-02T19:22:46+00:00

PyCon US 2026 call for proposals is now open

PyCon US is coming to the US west coast! 2026 and 2027 will both be held in Long Beach, California - the 2026 conference is set for May 13th-19th next year.

The call for proposals just opened. Since we'll be in LA County I'd love to see talks about Python in the entertainment industry - if you know someone who could present on that topic please make sure they know about the CFP!

The deadline for submissions is December 19th 2025. There are two new tracks this year:

PyCon US is introducing two dedicated Talk tracks to the schedule this year, "The Future of AI with Python" and "Trailblazing Python Security". For more information and how to submit your proposal, visit this page.

Now is also a great time to consider sponsoring PyCon - here's the sponsorship prospectus.

Via @pycon.us

Tags: call-for-proposals, conferences, pycon, python, psf

What are the conference/meet-ups on JavaScript that accept guest speakers?

2013-09-27T15:16:00+00:00

My answer to What are the conference/meet-ups on JavaScript that accept guest speakers? on Quora

We have a crowdsourced list of JavaScript events that are accepting speaker submissions here: JavaScript conference calls for participation

You can subscribe to that page via RSS to get updates on newly announced calls for speakers.

Tags: call-for-proposals, conferences, javascript, quora

What should tech conferences, events and planners do to add diversity?

2013-06-01T10:17:00+00:00

My answer to What should tech conferences, events and planners do to add diversity? on Quora

JSConf did something very clever that helped them get 25% female speakers last year: Beating the Odds - How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012

Their trick was to run an anonymous call for proposals, and then have a separate team go out and actively encourage people from under-represented groups to submit talks, and coach them to help them put together a great submission.

Read their article: it was a really successful strategy.

Tags: call-for-proposals, conferences, events, technology, quora, conference, diversity

What is the best place to post a call for papers in the computer science community?

2013-04-25T14:09:00+00:00

My answer to What is the best place to post a call for papers in the computer science community? on Quora

Our service Lanyrd has a feature to help keep track of conference CFPs. We tend to have more commercial conferences than academic ones, but those topics are definitely relevant to our core audience. For example, our Cloud conferences and events page shows six upcoming CFPs at the moment.

To add a CFP, sign in to Lanyrd and ensure we have a listing for an event - then edit that event and add the call, along with the deadline and details of how to submit.

Tags: call-for-proposals, computer-science, conferences, quora

How do you get invited to speak at high profile events?

2013-03-21T14:36:00+00:00

My answer to How do you get invited to speak at high profile events? on Quora

SXSW has an open call for proposals - you'll need to submit a suggestion to the panel picker and encourage people to vote for you.

TEDx events are run by volunteer teams - if you want to speak, get in touch with them as soon as you hear about the event.

There are plenty of conferences that only invite speakers - the trick to speaking at those is to give great talks at other events, build a reputation as a good speaker and then get introduced to the organisers (or introduce yourself).

We have a list if events with open calls for proposals here: http://lanyrd.com/calls/

Tags: call-for-proposals, conferences, speaking, quora

How should people organise software developer focused conferences in order that they achieve socially acceptable representation across relevant demographics (eg gender, ethnicity) in terms of speakers and attendees?

2013-01-03T11:01:00+00:00

My answer to How should people organise software developer focused conferences in order that they achieve socially acceptable representation across relevant demographics (eg gender, ethnicity) in terms of speakers and attendees? on Quora

No one wants to feel like they have only been invited to speak because of their gender/other demographic factors, especially since they risk losing some the respect of the audience if there is a feeling that they weren't invited purely for their expertise.

JSConf EU used a brilliant mechanism to avoid this problem last year, which is described in this article: Beating the Odds - How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012

The trick is to have an anonymised call for presentations - so talk submissions are judged on their merits by a panel of judges, without any risk of selection bias based on gender or personal reputation.

If you set this up properly, you almost completely remove the risk of someone being selected on anything other than the merit of their talk. Which means you can then have a separate team who go out and actively encourage people from a wider range of demographics to submit talks. [UPDATE: see the comment on this answer from Chris Williams which goes in to a lot more detail about this point]

JSConf had 234 submissions, 10% of which were from women. They ended up with 40 speaking slots, 25% of which were women. The feedback from attendees on the quality of the talks was excellent.

I'd like to see more technical conferences try using the same pattern. Early indications (from both JSConf EU and the We Are All Awesome conference from which they borrowed the idea) are that this is a very effective technique. As for attendees... hopefully, increasing the speaker balance will help encourage an improvement to the attendee balance as well.

Tags: call-for-proposals, conferences, software-engineering, quora, diversity

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

2007-12-05T15:28:22+00:00

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

XTech 2008 will be in Dublin, Ireland from the 6th to the 9th of May. Lots of really interesting topics in the CfP (OpenID, OAuth, Comet, CouchDB...)—deadline for submissions is the 25th of January.

Tags: call-for-proposals, comet, conferences, couchdb, oauth, openid, xtech