CFPs Made Easier

Check out this post by Lucy Bain about how to come up with an idea for what to talk about at a conference. I blogged last year about how I turn abstracts into talks, as well. Now that the SeaGL CFP is open, it’s time to look in a bit more detail about the process of going from a talk idea to a compelling abstract.

In this post, I’ll walk you through some exercises to clarify your understanding of your talk idea and find its audience, then help you use that information to outline the 7 essential parts of a complete abstract.

Getting ready to write your abstract

Your abstract is a promise about what your talk will deliver. Have you ever gotten your hopes up for a talk based on its abstract, then attended only to hear something totally unrelated? You can save your audience from that disappointment by making sure that you present what your abstract says you will.

I find the abstract to be the hardest part of the talk to write, because it sets the stage for every other part of it. If your abstract is thorough and clear about what your talk will deliver, you can refer back to it throughout the writing process to make sure you’re including the information that your audience is there for!

For both you and your audience to get the most out of your talk, the following questions can help you refine your talk idea before you even start to write its abstract.

Why do you love this idea?

Start working on your abstract by taking some quick notes on why you’re excited about speaking on this topic. There are no wrong answers! Your reasons might include:

  • Document a topic you care about in a format that works well for those who learn by listening and watching
  • Impress a potential employer with your knowledge and skills
  • Meet others in the community who’ve solved similar problems before, to advise you
  • Recruit contributors to a project
  • Force yourself to finish a project or learn more detail about a tool
  • Save novices from a pitfall that you encountered
  • Travel to a conference location that you’ve always wanted to visit
  • Build your resume
  • Or something else entirely!

Starting out by identifying what you personally hope to gain from giving the talk will help ensure that you make the right promises in your abstract, and get the right people into the room.

What’s your idea’s scope?

Make 2 quick little lists:

  • Topics I really want this presentation to cover
  • Topics I do not want this presentation to cover

Once you think that you have your abstract all sorted out, come back to these lists and make sure that you included enough topics from the first list, and excluded those from the second.

Who’s the conference’s target audience?

Keynotes and single-track conferences are special, but generally your talk does not have to appeal to every single person at the conference.

Write down all the major facts you know about the people who attend the conference to which you’re applying. How young or old might they be? How technically expert or inexperienced? What are their interests? Why are they there?

For example, here are some statements that I can make about the audience at SeaGL:

  • Expertise varies from university students and random community members to long-time contributors who’ve run multiple FOSS projects.
  • Age varies from a few school-aged kids (usually brought by speakers and attendees) to retirees.
  • The audience will contain some long-term FOSS contributors who don’t program, and some relatively expert programmers who might have minimal involvement in their FOSS communities
  • Most attendees will be from the vicinity of Seattle. It will be some attendees’ first tech conference. A handful of speakers are from other parts of the US and Canada; international attendees are a tiny minority.
  • The audience comes from a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds, and many attendees have day jobs in fields other than tech.
  • Attendees typically come to SeaGL because they’re interested in FOSS community and software.

Where’s your niche?

Now that you’ve taken some guesses about who will be reading your abstract, think about which subset of the conference’s attendees would get the most benefit out of the topic that you’re planning to talk about.

Write down which parts of the audience will get the most from your talk – novices to open source? Community leaders who’ve found themselves in charge of an IRC channel but aren’t sure how to administer it? Intermediate Bash users looking to learn some new tricks?

If your talk will appeal to multiple segments of the community (developers interested in moving into DevOps, and managers wondering what their operations people do all day?), write one question that your talk will answer for each segment.

You’ll use this list to customize your abstract and help get the right people into the room for your talk.

Still need an idea?

Conferences with a diverse audience often offer an introductory track to help enthusiastic newcomers get up to speed. If you have intermediate skills in a technology like Bash, Git, LaTeX, or IRC, offer an introductory talk to help newbies get started with it! Can you teach a topic that you learned recently in a way that’s useful to newbies?

If you’re an expert in a field that’s foreign to most attendees (psychology? beekeeping? Cray Supercomputer assembly language?), consider an intersection talk: “What you can learn from X about Y”. Can you combine your hobby, background, or day job with a theme from the conference to come up with something unique?

The Anatomy of an Abstract

There are many ways to structure a good abstract. Here are the 7 elements that I try to always include:

  1. Set the scene with a strong introductory sentence, which reminds your target audience of your topic’s relevance to them. Some of mine have included:

    • “Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.”
    • “Git is the most popular source code management and version control system in the open source community.”
    • “When you’re new to programming, or self-taught with an emphasis on those topics that are directly relevant to your current project, it’s easy to skip learning about analyzing the complexity of algorithms.”
  2. Ask some questions, which the talk promises to answer. These questions should be asked from the perspective of your target audience, which you identified earlier. This is the least essential piece of an abstract, and can be skipped if you make sure your exposition clearly shows that you understand your target audience in some other way. Here are a couple of questions I’ve used in abstracts that were accepted to conferences:

    • “Do you know how to control what information people can discover about you on an IRC network?”
    • “Is the project of your dreams ignoring your pull requests?”
  3. Drop some hints about the format that the talk will take. This shows the selection commitee that you’ve planned ahead, and helps audience members select session that’re a good fit for their learning styles. Useful words here include:

    • “Overview of”
    • “Case study”
    • “Demonstration”
    • “Deep dive into”
    • “Outline X principles for”
    • “Live coding”
  4. Identify what background knowledge the audience will need to get the talk’s benefit, if applicable. Being specific about this helps welcome audience members who’re undecided about whether the talk is applicable to them. Useful phrases include:

    • “This talk will assume no background knowledge of...”
    • “If you’ve used ____ to ____, ...”
    • “If you’ve completed the ____ tutorial...”
  5. State a specific benefit that audience members will get from having attended the talk. Benefits can include:

    • “Halve your Django website’s page load times”
    • “Get help on IRC”
    • “Learn from ____‘s mistakes”
    • “Ask the right questions about ____
  6. Reinforce and quantify your credibility. If you’re presenting a case study into how your company deployed a specific tool, be sure to mention your role on the team! For instance, you might say:

    • “Presented by [the original author | a developer | a maintainer | a long-term user] of [the project], this talk will...”
  7. End with a recap of the talk’s basic promise, and welcome audience members to attend.

These 7 pieces of information don’t have to each be in their own sentence – for instance, establishing your credibility and indicating the talk’s format often fit together nicely in a single sentence.

Once you’ve got all of the essential pieces of an abstract, munge them around until it sounds like concise, fluent English. Get some feedback on helpmeabstract.com if you’d like assistance!

Give it a title

Naming things is hard. Here are some assorted tips:

  • Keep it under about 50 characters, or it might not fit on the program
  • Be polite. Rude puns or metaphors might be eye-catching, but probably violate your conference or community’s code of conduct, and will definitely alienate part of your prospective audience.
  • For general talks, it’s hard to go wrong with “Intro to ___” or “___ for ___ users”.
  • The form “[topic]: A [history|overview|melodrama|case study|love story]” is generally reliable. Well, I’m kidding about “melodrama” and “love story”... Mostly.
  • Clickbait is underhanded, but it works. “___ things I wish I’d known about ___”, anyone?

Good luck, and happy conferencing!