CFPs 101

proving grounds i'd like to start by thanking our sponsors verse right productivity tenable amazon and source of knowledge i'm not clapping for tenable that's why i'm sitting in the middle so as guide guy dude guy mcdude fella guy mcdude fella said um we're gonna be recording this talk and uh i'm gonna be running the mic so just please wait for the mic before you ask your question so have you ever wondered why call for paper reviewers drink so much are you tired of having talks rejected from conferences without knowing why would you like to know what really makes reviewers happy or irritated well stick around for our next panel on call for papers 101 so please join me in welcoming the

panelists

we're going to start out with the introductions right okay hi everyone i'm david i'm your erstwhile moderator today otherwise known as david of the plan cfp oh hi i'm megan totenkoff uh i'm a senior security analyst with uh or consultant with rapid7 my name is moey i avoid work on a regular basis so i'm in management yes i'm guy mcdoudfella i am a compliance audit research engineer for tenable network security which is way better than rapid nine um so really quickly david before we get started in all honesty and i was giving eric a little bit of hard time earlier i think there's going to be two types of people in the room right now either one

people who are part of cfp review boards this is why we don't take you places you're not my real dad um either people who are part of cfp review boards and want to make some make a comment or something and we we want this to be conversational this is b-sides afterward uh overall and then also people who have active questions so um if you do have a question at any time feel free to interrupt us raise your hand eric will run over there with the mic and uh give it to you and we could we could talk about it sorry about that actually i'm gonna touch on a little more so i mean ostensibly this was about

you know how cfp works and how to get your talk accepted but if you have questions like well he said about you know you're on a cfp committee and you're trying to figure out you know how do you decide what talks to accept or not accept or have you figure out that criteria and things like that please you know feel free to ask those questions as well we're we're very bragnostic as long as it has something with acfp uh yeah we're good why do i have two cause you're special oh okay

okay so i think i'm gonna start with just so yeah we were discussing this earlier and the first rule which is actually also the second rule for cfps is follow the directions so there were a couple of submissions that we received this year that felt that some of our fields in open conf were optional if we put something there we want you to respond we want you to give us that information don't just give us a couple line blurb for your abstract and think it's sufficient for your outline as well because it's not uh right if they ask for x y and z give them x y and z don't add anything um don't feel like z is optional

uh if there's a you know a 2000 word limit in the field try to use as much of that as possible what you want to make sure you do is you're conveying your thoughts clearly and but more importantly you know how to follow instructions this is your first introduction to the con overall so you want them to know yeah working with me is going to be a positive experience because they're putting some trust in you and if if you're if the con if the cfp instructions are things like new talks only don't submit the talk you gave at b-sides ontario if if it's calling for new speakers don't submit the talk you gave at defcon

you're not a new speaker there are instructions there there are the cfp committee is looking for certain certain types of talks for certain tracks of the conference and going against that isn't going to win you any favors and also just a little bit about that so with the proving grounds track in particular we ask for new speakers only and it's a little cloudy because we have to do the announcement via twitter what does that mean so we say no national conferences things like defcon um derby con shmu khan besides las vegas and b-side san francisco are included in that as well but if you've spoken at another regional conference like one of the smaller b-sides or another

regional conference that wasn't recorded you're still applicable to apply for proving grounds so one of the things that it was alluded to is that if you know unless you are an incredibly well-known speaker and even then with your committee when you submit a cfp this is your first impression and one of the things that i encounter a lot i'm pretty sure like my panels will agree is that people don't always spell check or grammar check their submission so i'd like to hear your thoughts because there was some

if you were of the opinion in high school that english class was something you were never going to use you were [ __ ] wrong use punctuation use capital letters follow a style guide go go get a style guide go watch james ireland's talks on how to how to communicate to other people because the man is not wrong a lot of a lot of people in infosec are in technical roles and so we're not responsible for direct communication with clients or direct communication more than you know two or three sentences in a ticket or two or three sentences in an email unfortunately when you're writing a talk or writing a cfp response it is the exact opposite you

need to be verbose you need to be clear you need to be concise and you need to be well organized and we get talks that look like a [ __ ] e cummings poem so but with less structure with less structure and to build on that you know even if you're not going to go and get a style guide there's tools out there that'll help you out i'm not a great writer i know that that's a weakness of mine um but i use things like grammarly to help me out to review what i'm going to submit before i submit it to make sure that that you know i'm good and i'm signed off you have to to look at it

from the reviewer's perspective as well in some cases and david could talk to this even a little bit more you know these folks are reviewing tens if not hundreds of submissions so immediately not being able to cohesively understand the writing is going to put you at a disadvantage because it's like i have to figure this out in order for you to convey your idea to me what makes what makes me think that you're going to be able to do this you know in front of 50 100 people see if people are well sorry not go ahead the cfp board of reviewers will spend on average two to five minutes per talk in the first round just to figure out

whether or not you are sane enough to put in front of a group of people right and if you're not able to convey what you want to talk about in two minutes of writing we're just going to ignore your talk and you're not going to make it onto the second round of review so i do have something to say about the verbosity thing i actually am fine if you're concise yeah like if you can clearly state what you want to do in 10 words instead of 50 that is totally fine i just need to be able to understand okay this is what you want to talk about and the why and how you're going to get

me to the main purpose of your talk but the thing is that you really can't give a csp committee too much detail about your talk exactly and also now so and actually i'm going to say that back because we actually had several submissions where people were actually pasting code like and sample code into the into the and that's not actually a good example of that's actually a little too much detail because my case at least for a lot of times yeah that would depend on the audience i would argue so for things like uh defcon for example you know you might want to submit code to be like hey listen i'm not just talking out of my

butt but this is actually that's a situation where you can submit supplemental materials right exactly you submit that you don't put it in your abstract or you can put it in your accent that's what some local materials are for are things like presentations white papers things that establish your bona fides or your qualifications to speak even if you're a new speaker say look here's this white paper i wrote here's this you know here's a link to my github repository it's a more code oriented conference here our blog posts are written on the topic here's a sample presentation i did elsewhere and also if you have sources that you used while you're writing your talk like

okay this is where i'm drawing my ideas from that can be helpful too i mean i love it when someone submits a citation saying hey i'm talking about this but it also relates to this other talk in a different way and then i'll go in and look at it i'm like okay that's kind of interesting actually and i can see okay this is a pre-existing talk that's been done before yes but this person has a new or different outlook on it citing work when you're submitting a cfp response shows us two things first it shows us that you have a grasp of the subject matter and it also shows us that you've done your homework and you're not just trying

to reiterate something somebody else has already said you're building upon it and that's important i mean the whole point of giving a talk in front of people is to advance the state of the art and so by showing us citations in your cfp response you're showing us that you're willing to do the work in order to advance the state of the art so and speaking uh since we're serving on this on this general trend one of the places where that we've significantly seen issues over over the past several years are talks where someone is releasing a new tool or discussing a new tool that they've been involved with and they don't make it clear whether it's a free

tool a commercial tool open source shared source whatever and what ends up happening is the submission the submission isn't reading like a product pitch and the feedback we give is this sounds like a product pitch and it really a good time the time the person who knows that says oh it's open source and you don't need to video it it's being released by company who happens to be a commercial vendor but you don't need to use the rest of the company's products you can use independently you can build it yourself tell us and

if i wanted to hear product pitches masquerading as talks that go to rsa yeah anyways yeah some and plus a lot of cfps when you when you read the instructions we'll actually say we don't want vendor pitches exactly so that goes back to following directions and a lot of cons will actually have a separate area for vendors i mean you don't need to do product pitches in talks at black hat when you've got the entire vendor floor with an auditorium directly for product pitches okay just to add on to that black that's one of them where there are just to add on to that there's conferences like those where there are tracks that are designated as you know

what we can think of as pay for play like it's clearly it's it's kind of like when you go to google and you search and you have their search results and you have the sponsored listings that are clearly separated and they're both useful in their own ways as long as they're separated exactly any questions so far or any like we don't have to stick to the model make this man work folks yeah so one of the things that's frustrating to me i i probably submit to somewhere between five to ten conferences a year and a frustration of mine is that it's kind of a black box when i have asked about how do these talks get selected

i've had varying answers all over the board sometimes there's a system where they get scored and that scoring process is a matrix and it's very organized and they use like open conference and there's that and sometimes it's like uh you know we kind of sit around and drink a bunch of beers and if we like it then it gets advanced if we don't like it concerning the floor um do you think do you see any conferences moving towards some transparency when they say we're announcing a call for papers and we use a three-person panel with a scoring system like this and these are the people on the panel because that makes a huge difference in the way that

i submit and i think that providing that transparency might help give some context to the people that are submitting so besides las vegas is one of the conferences and david could actually talk to this so whether you're submitting to proving ground or you're submitting to the general cfp here you know we we have our cfp panel that reviews but everyone is required on every talk that they review to provide some kind of feedback uh we typically david correct me for a moment we typically especially on the proving ground side we will send that feedback directly to the submitter um just so that we're saying hey we didn't think this was fully banked out or we

liked it and but we we were you know we had some better content or what's going on um i know in previous years before guy has has joined us uh we actually would sit down with people that were not accepted and say okay this is what happened we have half an hour hour calls on that yeah so in in the past it besides we have published in the cfp committee is and we have to get back to that and kind of fell down purely because there was too much to do not enough time to do it all um for the purposes of transparency um what we do here for b-sides las vegas for the for the main tracks is that we

have a scoring system uh all talks get scored on a scale of one to six um and then we look at and then we basically break down the scores by track that you submitted to and if it more or less made enough talks it basically falls out of the curve and we sort of pick a spot we don't have a hard spot you never really get a shorter spot where it's putting anything with this line this year it's a clear accept anything below this number is a queer decline and then we end up with with each track every year is like 20 to 40 talks depending on the track that would be fine like that score wise

are great for the conference but we have like six slots left and that's when in pastors just me and this year have a co-chair we sit down and we look at the talks all these talks and say what makes the most coherent conference what do we think really pulls that trap together in a coherent frame of thought or is there talking anything that's really important for people to see um and then we sort of go back and forth and you know there's a little hand ladies up at that point honestly and we say okay this looks like the best path this is the best we can put together the best conference we can put together that'll make for the best you

know that the attendees will enjoy or find the most uh useful and then we sort of go down a little bit and say okay here are the backup speakers we can continue that trend and then we say damn we have another 15 talks that we just couldn't accept and that's a that sucks um actually can i just continue on this question because i think it piggybacks well off a point we want to make a little bit later but really around um it is i i hear what you're saying jay because it is frustrating because i've had some i haven't had talks accepted at derby con but not accepted at sector um and and things on those lines i think it's

it to kind of internalize it you really have to understand your audience yes right and ensure that hey not every talk is for every venue um and it may not be anything on your submission or a problem with it your submission directly it just me to david's point they're trying to fit a specific theme or fit a specific feel to the event and no offense but maybe your talk wasn't part of it because like i said my talk i've had this exact same submission great detail on both derby took it sector said nah that's okay and also there's quite a few places that don't give you feedback by default so do make sure that you follow up for

feedback for those of you who aren't familiar with that like we try to give uh each of us give feedback for why we rejected something if other than not following the directions but uh i mean it takes a while to art tastefully state why you're rejecting certain things yeah it's it's i've had i mean and again it's it's okay to ask a cfp board why a talk was rejected if you don't get feedback i've had talks that i've submitted to shmukon that got rejected and the first time i was like oh man that sucks the second time i was like why did you guys reject this talk and they said because the subject area is good but we had

talks like this in previous years and we want to give the subject to rest for a little bit and that's reasonable like okay it wasn't me it's the fact that they're trying to keep they're trying to broaden the perspectives of the attendees but frankly besides as a movement started eight years ago seven years ago something like that something like that that lost track of whatever um because a bunch of us had talks get rejected by black cat and feedback consistently was these are good talks and you still have enough room at least you know what we really want to give these talks i have a house come to my house we'll have our own conference with

blackjack and hookers and someone else said i'll get i can i work for whoever it was and we'll stream it for free online we said dump and we showed up and decided

as well they get way more talks than they can accept and the torture extent is the role of dice remember how i said a few minutes ago that we take two to five minutes per talk in the first round that's because you all submit a [ __ ] ton of talks we don't have time to sit down and and give every talk a measured unfortunately we don't the cfp boards are relatively small and it's impossible to go through and give detailed nuance feedback on every talk and so sometimes when you're at a talk when you're talking about a conference like derby or defcon or black hat or sector it's impossible for the cfp reward to

give you the feedback that they want to give and that's why it's important to ask and that actually leads me to another next question for my channel then we'll get to your question which is we were discussing earlier uh titles matter and even harder than writing a good abstract is coming up with a good title and it's an unfortunate truth that so besides had 180 some subdivisions across the four four tracks that's a lot of submissions to go through and i've done the review board for shmucon and they get even more than that you are saying it's literally thousands so you need to just yeah and you know especially the scales like rsa they're going to get 10 talks about the same

topic they're almost identical and you need to be able to catch the viewer's eyes just so that you get more reviews just people looking at yourself spending more time on it um and catchy title is really hard and i think my panelists will share some of the formats or the sort of macros they're really tired okay guys if any of you submit a talk that is word colon word ever again you're going to make everybody on a cfp board have a sad also blank for fun and profit it's been done stop stop please you just you just gave you just made that happy i'm glad okay so today i delivered my first presentation at proving ground

congratulations and the feedback has been good as this man has attested um so where do i go from here i want to keep giving presentations submit them to other con yeah do i submit the same one to other cons do i have to now come up with new stuff if i come back to b sites do i never come back to proving ground it's only the other yeah i would never be back here ever again okay because that's that's the design so also i'm done with the single a i'm now in the double a league yes okay so on that note as a guy who's local to you and who's telling you that the b-side cfp is

opening next week yes conference some conferences feel different i don't know about the rest of besides lv different countries feel differently about the same material my mantra is i never give the same talk twice sometimes i give the same talk twice but it's not really the same one like it's it'll be the same basic idea but it'll have new material or updated or ongoing research or whatever oh so if you are going to submit the same talk a lot of cfps have the question have you submitted this present presentation before and if so where and it's your job to say okay yes i gave it before but here's how it's markedly different or improved from before

because otherwise you know you're just giving them old material like i gave a half hour here so if i'm applying for an hour long slot obviously okay um is it kosher to submit more than one cfp oh absolutely sure yeah yeah okay vote or submit and submit often it's important yeah yeah so like we had over the years and this happens every year we have someone who will submit almost the same talk multiple times so they'll be like they'll change the name slightly they'll change some of the working around but it's really the same talk and pretty much as soon as that happens i go click click click design ball remember this though the whole point of

giving advice is to advance the state of the art and if you're giving the same talk multiple times you're reforming leftovers you're not advancing the state of the art so yeah before submitting multiple ones you're saying that if i say well i have an idea about this x and one about y what about z that's right you may say well x and y but c yeah submit three talks about three different topics and we said maybe yes yeah but then also before we had someone else get two talks i was like oh man i should have both of these talks i'm gonna go for this one and i really wish i could have accepted both but

there's only so much time and i want to you know diverse my speakers this one's not true someone will be accepted somewhere else yeah just my only warning about that is be careful because they may be accepted and then you have to do the work because i've been in that position as well where i've had multiple talks yeah i'm like oh yeah it's stressful as a speaker yeah and i i can attest that i i had two talks that thankfully i co-presented they got accepted and placed back to back so just yeah and the more community the the event the more probably likely that you may get accepted for multiple talks so yes that's actually a problem so rsa in

particular is traditional multiple talks because it's social crap shoot two years ago i was i ended up giving five bucks one i had to do twice so six six slots in three days and it was murder yeah i guess what i would say is yeah feel free to submit multiple talks as long as you're following the directions follow the [ __ ] directions as long as you're following the directions follow the [ __ ] direction it's not that hard you guys have been doing it since well no you guys haven't been doing that that's why we're all here but in this one case follow the directions yes i have a question and i'm happy to hear this from

either side even for the submitters or the reviewers because like bowie like i do a lot of both um one of the things that i get tired of and besides lv is fantastic about and is i'm tired of going to conferences and seeing everybody look like me you mean like like like like a white dude with a beard and a black in a black shirt i mean that's just the reality i'm wearing a blue shirt yeah like youngish okay well i'm not right right right no but but in other words it is important to me for a lot of different reasons i know it's important to a lot of people that certainly from the speaker level we get

people who are not traditionally as represented i am curious both from the side of how do we encourage more of these submissions because i want that and how can we make sure that yes so how can we make that happen more from your perspective i think i'm hitting

this is my response so first of all as a reviewer the name of the person so with openconf we don't see the name of the person when we first review the talk and i would actually caution against looking at the name or googling the handle until after you've determined whether or not you want to accept the talk because i'm going to be pissed off if i find out that my talk was accepted because i'm a female versus the merits of my talk sure right however as someone who is involved with several conferences i have very little problem when getting to that window of we have 20 talks that are that we would like to accept and four slots

to make sure there's diversity because if they are all let's see yes that's the thing one thing is i'm down to the bucket i don't get names until i have my bucket out i have ten talks and four slots i'm going to bias because the thing is there's a lot of inherent bias in the system as you as you know yeah and so and so that's just like the thing is like when when these slides started we had almost no one in submitting

exactly and now the submission is like 40 percent female yeah and that's fantastic because one of the ways you get more women submitting is by having representation of women and now it's not a problem because we didn't submit that because trust me so there there are far smarter people who have given far better talks and presentations on this than i want but one of the reasons why i love this program why i love the proving grants program is because you're pairing people with mentors and i think mentorship is one of the biggest things that we can do to sort of work towards solving this problem because a lot of people come from backgrounds and a lot of

people women especially friends that i've talked to are thinking well i don't know if i'm good enough to submit this talk i'm like you're doing amazing work in cutting-edge areas with really cool [ __ ] you need to submit this talk imposter syndrome is really strong and mentorship is one of the ways we talk about that better this is gonna okay having a code of conduct on the website to start with matters yeah it actually will change your submission metrics hugely just the basis of that an explicit statement in that fact yeah so i would say mentor like even outside the b-sides programs if i was talking to him earlier one of the other counts

so one of the other comments i'm involved in we were actually inspired by proving ground in particular so when we were first having the discussions you know because with this we have you have three buckets right you have the talks that you're absolutely not going to accept it's just not going to happen you're the talks that you really want to and you're some that maybe you don't know right that they with the right thing so we're trying to find ways to assign mentors um or or do some sort of mentorship and some but yeah we try and advise speakers who are less well known yeah so that was what i was gonna say when i

have ten speakers and four slots i'll look at the names see their speaker resume and those who are the least experienced or have something that's actually like a fresh voice i'm more willing to choose those individuals and frankly like i don't need random speaking slots yeah i mean i've given literally hundreds of talks at this point in my career i'm old that's the thing about proving ground and this is true is that conferences need good speakers they need speakers period and i got told by a mentor of mine 12 years ago she said you should be speaking at conferences i said i have nothing to say she said trust me you do um and once you give them two or three

talks people will become a known quantity and then you'll start getting asked to submit to conferences it's totally true even now and yeah the best mentoring you can do in the community is i've even i was talking to someone um at the airport that's sitting on our way over and they're like well i i've been thinking about talking consuming conferences i don't really have anything to say i said what do you do amazing like i do i work at a storage company that does storage in the cloud and i smoke and i can make sure that i run security for them i'm like so how do you deal with compliance and your customers you've got

okay you have a talk right there write that up your civilian's proving ground next year i said okay yeah and they got accepted didn't they no this is foreign

for one more second the other thing we do in improving ground to to kind of rule that out as a as a factor at all is a lot of our process and tiny hit on it on the cfp review side is that's blind to us we don't see names we don't see anything but when we're doing our pairing between speaker and mentor the speakers and men are the the mentors get to choose their speakers they don't know who that speaker is so they don't know if they're choosing a male or female so they're basing hey i really want to jump on this based on the content and why this talk is chosen so uh that's another

thing is try to remove that diversity as even a factor because the contents standing up standing on itself yeah uh so we've been talking a lot on the sort of b sides or larger conference style uh where you have way more talks than slots and i'm curious about the other end of the spectrum and sort of what you've seen on that side where you potentially don't have enough talks and what you can do about that whether it's trying to garner more more people restricting slots lowering your standards like what sort of approaches do you take there this is this is really good don't don't lower your standards um hit twitter hit facebook are willing to give talks

ask around try something different try doing you know re-designate a session as birth a segment is verge of a feather session where people show up and sign up spur the moment to do things or start saying find someone who's willing to do a free training yeah no sorry just go ahead yeah it it i mean to your point there's so many different things i mean at the end of the day if you're if you're an organizer you want to bring content and that content could be in several different formats and trying to again get content that fits your venue and the theme that you're trying to hit think one for your first think one day

one track then you only need like six speakers yeah um in fact we recommend is uh if you talk if you email info at securitybesides.org we can send you your we have a sort of starter kit for doing a b sides which applies to any conference the big recommendation is one day one track to get started if you've never been running a conference before particularly with a smaller a smaller region back there yeah i had a question about putting in a cfp that is not a specific technical talk in infosec so i was in proving ground and i was a past software developer in law school and i submitted a legal talk and i kind of really

struggled with the cfp on how i'm going to come in and do a legal talk how much legal background do i need to put into the cfp so you have any idea what i'm talking about so you have any recommendations in general when it's not a super technical so that was actually one of the things we talked about earlier by the way wendy had a fantastic talk today you all need to go up and see the recording it was fantastic but tony has in class earlier today about specifically this topic about right section so i think if you submit something that is related to the infosec field but not super technical it also it would

definitely help to use the uh words and terms that we can understand and grasp because a lot of lawyers speak goes way over my head but if you can give me metaphors and analogies that's more than sufficient short muscle short one syllable words are good i feel like half of my mentor's job was i don't know what that word means to you yeah exactly right so that's good feedback because if he if they don't know what it is then chances are the audience doesn't know so we have a problem in infosec where we're kind of stuck in this echo chamber where we just like preached to the choir we're like oh we need to talk about user

awareness and it's like oh um what do you guys know about user awareness what we need to do is bring in people from other fields to talk to us about things like privacy compliance auditing management whatever law psychology and then we need to go out to other industries and talk to them and in order to do so in order to be successful with this we need to use a common language one thing i would would actually this is actually something i've had a discussion with with a number of colleagues if you're having trouble getting your talk submitted to a security conference submit it to a non-security conference there are tons of development conferences there are tons of

of other industry specific conferences there i mean tech is is a large umbrella we are one small part of it and we're the ones that focus on security but that doesn't mean that people in other fields need to hear but don't need to hear about this as well submit a security talk submit a web application security talk to a web application conference so it was actually channel student advice that your question brought up to me that we were discussing earlier uh as we were planning our pancake one is that when you're submitting your talk alter your mind you know focusing your bio on the parts that are relevant to your talk's content um right and most security conferences no

one's going to care if you're cisp or not unless your talk is about about certifications in which case it may be relevant um the other thing is um now i'm sure my final thoughts on this is that the whole many eyes make all bugs shallow so if you're not sure about your abstract i mean even if you're positively abstract get someone else to read it yes particularly just in general make sure you bring it down people say is this a talk you would want to see like does this excite you the other thing is particularly if you're in a field that touches on security say legal stuff like that bring that to someone who is not a

lawyer or who's not trained in legal and say would you go see this does this make sense to you right um so you can get that that perspective like your mentor was going to go i don't know what these 12 words mean this could mean anything before i submit any talk i have three friends that i haven't asked to review i have a very technical one for the purposes of this

very technical someone uh someone very technical someone who's not technical and then me and just a third party just another set of eyes someone who i consider a peer at work or something that will review something for me just to say hey is this something you would like to see what are your thoughts uh just to kind of bounce that off and and sometimes they could have given me very harsh feedback it's technical guys a lot of my talks are a little bit more soft skill talking i was like nah i don't want to see this okay and also this also falls into the whole know your audience thing so you're not gonna want to go to um

i don't know i don't have a good example don't take a deeper talk to the compliance folks yeah vice versa and vice versa don't take a secure development talk to the compliance folks one thing that i like to do is before i submit a talk anywhere i'll look up the conference that i'm looking to submit to and look at the past two years presentations and say and say see okay this is the kind of talks they accept would my content fit this would the audience be interested in this

hi i'll pre-face it by saying i only speak english but i'm just wondering if you guys have ever received talks or consider talks um in another language like not english yeah so we have a lot of non-native english speakers uh presenting at our at proving grounds actually at this proving grounds too i think this year we had at least one or two yeah yeah and so yeah virginia robbins is is french and she's presenting a talk on filos malware and she's giving a fantastic talk so for non-native speakers i would actually i don't know if you would want to say that you're a non-native speaker in the cfp or not because it's pretty nice but sometimes when it is evident i try

to take that into consideration when i review like okay this content's still good and if they have something to share i still want to give them a venue i would actually think the opposite and the ones that that i've read at least sometimes their grammar and their english is probably better than native english speakers yes so just to clarify um so so not necessarily accident basically the actual presentation itself like if it was entirely in french is that something that's uh because like there's a conference so besides paris yeah i mean generally yeah i mean most conferences these days are actually in english regardless of where you go in the world um i mean there's lots of lots of

conferences that are language specific but anything that pulls an international audience is generally english unfortunately that's true but then but they will often have an english language track even at that point right so i i actually spoke at a conference in uh in colombia and all the talks almost all the talks were in english and um they were doing simultaneously they had simultaneous translation into uh spanish french and portuguese and japanese actually uh going on for people who were non who were not comfortable with english it's another little esco if you give a talk to a non-native english-speaking population jokes don't work and you need to slow the [ __ ] down because they're translating in their heads

but seriously jokes just don't work yeah okay okay one more time for one more question during that and then we need to wrap up yeah because food yes because food thank you for you know being there and answer our questions um i actually this is my first time to besides

so i i'm really excited to actually present here sometime whenever either here or somewhere because you just told us that i mean unlike blackhead and defcon where they see your bios and you know how many times you have presented and how famous are you you actually look at the content because honestly i was attending one talk and and and i have a startup i'm a founder of a startup and and i the area i was working on i was attending those talks and it was interesting to see how customers are thinking about that problem and and i think there i don't know how you feel about it but i think like as a vendor not about your product but as a

vendor i felt like talking about the challenges that we have to reach to these customers and get their data and share with us and work with us to build these products so i wonder if you give a chance to people like me to speak in and if yes what's the next step that i should be doing for the next event

if you haven't been doing public speaking at a major conference uh clearly you know please submit to you know the main tracks as well um every year um i don't think this year most years we have a few talks that get submitted to proving ground where the speaker is just so outstanding that we've actually actually in the last last year we had two talks we had one that we kicked over this year yeah they had two talks last year that were so good they kicked the door to us and actually both of them were given in i think common ground uh but they got them they got to keep their mentors so they got their yeah but the dogs were

good enough uh that there was too many those these two said you know what these would be great in the main tracks and so they had mentors and they gave they were brand new speakers never spoken but gave 15 minute long presentations and they were awesome yeah um i i mean something like that is is just really how you position it you know we we kind of hit on earlier we not necessarily want to hear a product pitch but you know if you were to position that something like how do you work with vendors to build better products you know and under so that people here could understand that the life cycle you know because

i i forgot who was presenting earlier but you know no one raised their hands when they say oh who likes talking to vendors right oh oh yeah yeah but but you know if we understood well vendors are part of that conversation that's a way to introduce your topic appropriately just don't call your talk vendors colon

developers right exactly yeah developers developers but i'm cool okay so we do we do need to wrap it up um any final thoughts i know my final thought is read the [ __ ] directions and then follow them um so i i have one final thought um something that we didn't cover is um when you're submitting if you have the room um provide an outline um show us that i mean probably i know i do before i submit you have a thought process of what's going on what you want to present how you're going to present it use the space and show how you're going to actually get to your talk that provides us as the reviewers a a

good clear understanding of where you're going to take this talk and what's going to go what's going to go on you know a quick bullet list these are the the five seven topics that i'm going to cover this is the format i'm going to cover it in even if it's not fully baked out i mean start sketching that out really helps us as reviewers details and entails to follow up on what we're saying having that outline in place saves you a [ __ ] ton of work when if your talk actually gets accepted because now hey you've got a basis for your slides yeah and so mine is kind of like a two-parter first of all don't be afraid

to submit something just because you think someone has covered it in another talk it's okay because you might have a fresh perspective or give us information in your cfp that we might not have seen in a previous talk and then also if you submit a cfp about something you're really passionate about that comes across in your writing and we're more excited to accept it because it's something you're actually interested in and we can see that by the level of detail you give us the information that you give us instead of something like oh iot is cool right now i guess i'll do an iot talk yeah so um raise your hands if you've if you've

done a fair enough if you do if you speak regularly at conferences i would say that i i do as well i would estimate that anywhere between 30 to 60 of my toxicity or get rejected yeah yeah right yeah right giving to right cf waiting cfps is really hard and the only way to get better at it is to do it a lot so don't be disparaged if you when you submit your if you submit to a conference and it gets rejected don't be disparaged if you submit to three or four or five conferences you will start getting talks accepted particularly if you can get good feedback on what's going on but the first couple

are going to be hard

thank you for coming