DevOpsDays Phoenix 2018 is planned for October, 23rd at Galvanize in downtown Phoenix. Sessions will begin at 9am and go until 4pm. We are currently accepting session and anecdote proposals from interested speakers. This is your chance to be a more active part in the conference and place your mark on the Phoenix-area or Arizona local DevOps community.

The CFP will close onAugust 15th, 2018. Session review and selection will begin on August 1st and emails will go out over the following three weeks. Last year we had well over 100 submissions so the review process can take some time. Like last year we have no plans to pay speakers or reimburse speakers for travel.

The organizers have listened to feedback from 2017 and have made a few changes this year. Aside from getting the whole professional video situation figured out we’re restructuring the track format and CFP process.

Building content for a conference with such a diverse set of potential topics and diverse attendee background can be a challenge. This year we’re going to run three tracks:

1. Getting Started: Half hour sessions for beginners in a specific domain.
2. Advanced: Half hour sessions for experienced and forward looking attendees.
3. Case Studies / Fail Stories: Fifteen minute sessions for people of all experience ranges where speakers share technical or cultural anecdotes where they succeeded or failed in a DevOps related domain. Failure is fun. People love to know that other people fail on occasion.

Each track should cover a wide range of subjects like:

• Automation (CI/CD, Automated Remediation)
• Monitoring, Visibility, and Observability
• Alarm Management, and Paging
• Network Management, Microservices, and Mesh
• Log Shipping and Aggregation
• Dealing with State Locality (storage platforms, replication, recovery)
• Secrets, Configuration Management, and Resiliency Platforms
• Containerization, and Rearchitecting for Functional Platforms
• Culture (preparing for change, and maintaining and surviving ops)
• and others

DevOpsDays is as much of a community building event as an opportunity for professional development. So, just like last year we are not looking for vendor pitches. Sessions that reference specific products or tools are welcome, and submissions from people who work for a tooling company are welcome. We just ask that if you’re talking about a problem space where you have a financial interest that you talk about the problem space and general approach. If you want to sell your tooling consider sponsoring the event and setting up shop in the expo hall.

Our criteria for selection in the “Getting Started” and “Advanced” tracks are as follows:

1. Relevant Content: This is a technical skills conference that covers problems, tools, and culture related to DevOps.
2. Clear Expectations of the Audience: Skill set or experience leveling - we need to know who this is for.
3. Local Presenters: Experience and notoriety go a long way - but if we can find a Phoenix-area or Arizona local with similar experience and expertise we’ll select their proposal.

For “Case Studies / Fail Stories / Lightning Talks” we’d love to see:

1. Presenters that Represent the Local Tech Community: Sharing experiences with your neighbors is what makes us neighbors. This includes you, yes you. We’d love to get to know our neighbors regardless of age, gender, race, or other fuzzy and arbitrary human classifiers. 
2. New Presenters: We’re all human and nobody is judging. We’d love to see more members of our community speak out and be heard.
3. Lessons Learned: Professional anecdotes are always best when paired with some retrospective and key take away for the audience.

Chances are that if you have been working in this field for any amount of time you have learned something valuable, and if you have learned it then it stands to reason that other people will value that experience. 

Been on the job for 20 years? I bet you’ve seen quite a bit of change and insight into the next round of obstacles. Stand up and share. 

Been on the job for 20 days? Wow, I can imagine you’ve learned a ton in that time and will only have learned more by the time the conference rolls around. Keep developing that mastery by sharing with your peers! Stand up and share.

Make some silly mistakes or come full-circle on a hard-held belief? Consider submitting a Case Study / Fail Story. We’re all better off learning from other people’s mistakes.

Things that we really don’t want to see:

1. Proprietary Information: I mean, as much as we’d all think we’d like to find out about Company X’s secret sauce the only people who would actually benefit are the lawyers we’d all have to hire over the next decade. Don’t share confidential, proprietary, or business secrets.
2. Unprofessional or Off-Topic Content, Material, or Speech: We just aren’t going to tolerate noise that harms the community building that we are trying to do here. And learning this stuff is difficult enough without these kind of distractions. We have a Code of Conduct and that applies to everyone including speakers.

We’d love to select subjects or proposals that have pairs and create a schedule with overlapping “Getting Started” and “Advanced” sessions. If we have many proposals to choose from we will end up selecting smart pairs first. For that reason, if you’re interested in speaking you might consider submitting a few different proposals. Submitting a proposal shouldn’t take more than half an hour. Don’t stress, just kick out the ideas. We really want to hear from you.