I did quite a bit of conference and meetup speaking in 2016 and 2017, but decided to take 2018 off of speaking due to some burnout and health concerns. But now I'm back! But the landscape seems to be totally different from the last time I was CFP hunting.
Lanyrd is permanently down, the Technically Speaking newsletter is now defunct, and Papercall.io continues to be an unhelpful mess.
For those of you who do conference speaking, which channels do you keep an eye on for finding new CFPs?
Top comments (17)
Also taking a non-local speaking break, but I want to get back into it soon.
this newsletter is awesome. Great, curated CFPs each week.
this twitter account also has a ton!
List of conferences with CPF deadlines for front-end developers
For front-end and web dev conferences, here's a list maintained by Ben Ilegbodu, who's lead front end engineer at Eventbrite and does a fair bit of really good talks on React and front end stuff.
What I do is to watch the repo for pull requests to get updates on new CPFs.
My absolute best option for this kind of thing has to be papercall.io. I found this site through an event that was running their CFP with it and later on I started seeing several others that were going along the same path. Needless to say, I just made an account there and have been using it ever since.
I’m aware of papercall but think it’s kind of a mess. Searching and filtering is pretty blunt, they make it very difficult to tell whether or not conferences comp travel expenses for speakers, and a lot of the CFPs on that site are for ongoing local meet ups rather than conferences.
Papercall is certainly better than nothing, but it’s honestly not as good as some of the resources that existed a couple years ago, so I guess I’m spoiled.
Well, I guess I don't have that many opinions about the site itself because I normally find the CFPs in other sites and then get directed to the papercall site haha. I think I never used the site directly. Sorry I can't be of much help here
I run a free newsletter for tech conference speakers. It's simply a list of all of the CFPs closing that week.
There's also a Twitter and RSS feed if you prefer that 😃
What is a CFP ?
A call for proposal. It’s the form you fill out when you’re applying to a conference. Your response is competitively evaluated against other applicants.
Thanks! Not familiar at all with the world of conferences. Do most conferences pay you for speaking? Wondering if it's something that generates income for you.
At my level speaking is really more of a way to get comped conferences and professional development. I’m sure people who keynote regularly can make some money off of it, but for me any payment beyond a comped ticket and travel expenses is usually fairly modest.
However, there are conferences like Grace Hopper that don’t comp anything and make their speakers buy a ticket. I am fundamentally opposed to that and think you should never speak at a conference that does that. My general rule is I don’t pay for travel or lodging to speak at any conference that charges its attendees. I will, however, pay for travel and such to speak at a conference that’s free to attendees, like PyOhio.
Totally agree! They should at least allow you free entrance. Having you speak at their conference AND pay a ticket is pretty ridiculous, it means they're profiting two times from you. But that goes to show that for some companies or people profit not ethics is the only thing that counts.
It’s the same old refrain - “we’re giving you exposure!” 🙃
Yeah right ... nice try :-)
Hi Jess,
we recently launched speakerhouse.io, a platform that helps tech speakers connect with events, and one thing that we have is a CFP listing that (we hope) is useful.
Come take a look and if you have any feedback, just let us know in twitter @speakerhouseio 😃
I'm feeling this pretty heavily lately. I feel like there is a void in terms of filtering to conferences I would be interested in. Excited to see what people have to say!
There's some notable events on eventil.com/, but it kinda depends on the type of conferences.
This is a great resource that I wasn't aware of before. Thank you!
I'm generally interested in Python, data, and infrastructure. Thanks again!