Thanks for your interest in speaking at EuRuKo 2019! The conference will be held on June 21 & 22, 2019 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

There are fourteen speaking slots, four of which are reserved for our invited keynote speakers. That leaves ten slots for you, and because we expect hundreds of submissions the odds may seem against you. Many people however don’t read these guidelines in their entirety, and will see their proposal rejected as a result. Increase your odds by not being one of them.

For any questions about the CFP, please reach out to program@euruko.org.

Important dates

1. This call for proposals closes March 3, 2019 at 23:59:59 CET.
2. We will contact you about your proposal on or before April 12, 2019. If not, please contact us!

Code of Conduct

We require all talks to comply with our Code of Conduct. Please review it before submitting your proposal, and contact organisers@euruko.org with any questions.

What we’re looking for

EuRuKo is a two-day, single track conference focussed on Ruby and Ruby developers in the broadest sense. That means we welcome deep dives into Ruby, but we’re also excited about non-Ruby proposals that are relevant to Ruby developers. Please keep in mind that our audience varies from novice to seasoned Rubyists (and you shouldn’t cater to one narrow demographic).

We welcome both new and experienced speakers. We place a strong value on having a diverse lineup of speakers, because people from different backgrounds come with a wealth of different experiences.

What we aren’t looking for are sales pitches, “my gem fixes everything”-talks, and proposals that clearly weren’t given enough thought and attention. As a rule of thumb, having a tweet-length text for the Description and Notes fields usually isn’t enough to properly convey what your talk is about, what attendees will take away, why this talk is a great fit for EuRuko, why you’re qualified to speak on the topic, etc.

Session format

All sessions are 30 minutes long lecture-style presentations, without any Q&A. If you want to share the stage with a co-presenter, please have only one person submit (and include a line about the number of presenters).

Please don’t reuse presentations that were developed for a different session length; trying to fit a 20-minute or 40-minute talk hardly ever works. If you want to reuse a previous talk that’s fine, but consider building it from the ground up.

Speaker benefits

1. Free admission to the conference (if you already have purchased a ticket and are accepted to speak, we’ll issue a refund; don’t wait with purchasing a ticket when sales start or you may miss out!).
2. Travel reimbursement within reasonable limits. If your company can cover your expenses instead, we’ll list them as “speaker sponsor” because they help keep ticket prices affordable. We don’t offer a honorarium.
3. Any help you need in getting to Rotterdam, including sponsorship letters if needed for immigration services.
4. The opportunity to be paired to a speaker mentor to help you prepare your talk (content, slides, dry runs, whatever you need). This isn’t mandatory, but recommended for new speakers.

Review process

A program committee of volunteers will review all proposals and select which proposals are accepted and rejected.

The first round of review is blind, and reviewers will not see your “Profile Details” during the first round. This eliminates some of the unconscious bias anyone may have. Please don’t put any identifying information in any fields in the “Talk Details” section, as this may lead to your proposal being rejected.

During the first round, reviewers may have questions about your proposal. These questions will be asked through Papercall. Please reply to these questions promptly and update your proposal if needed. This will increase your chances of being accepted. Your reply is anonymous in this round.

Once every talk has at least three ratings, we move into the second round. Highly-rated talks are evaluated alongside your Profile Details, and this is taken into account for final selection. We do this so we don’t end up with a single speaker giving three talks, and to find a balance between new and experienced speakers as well as having representatives from various backgrounds. Your background is evaluated in the broadest sense: gender identity, country of origin, level of experience and of course being qualified to speak on your subject (plus many more) are taken into account. If you think we need to know something about your background that’s relevant to you, the conference or your proposal, please put it in your Bio under your Profile Details.

After internal debate, and possibly more questions for you through Papercall, we make a final selection and reach out to accepted speakers. After that, we send rejection letters to the rest. There may be some overlap: if you have submitted more than one proposal and are selected, your rejected proposals will still receive the rejection email.

Rejected speakers will be offered the opportunity to ask why their proposal was rejected, and a member of the program committee will explain.

Thanks

Thanks for reading this far (you have just increased your odds of being accepted) and considering joining the EuRuKo 2019 line-up. We can’t wait to read about what you want to share!