Thank you for wanting to Speak at Pycon Ghana!
NOTE: Our Call for proposals (CFP) is closed
We are seeking speakers of all experience levels and backgrounds to contribute to our conference program! If you use Python professionally, as a hobbyist, or are just excited about Python or programming and open source communities, we'd love to hear from you. We want you and your ideas at PyCon Ghana!
Part of our purpose is to generate materials to help with Python education and advocacy in Ghana and all over the world, so we intend to record all PyCon Ghana's presentations and release the recordings on the web/Youtube Channel.
For the details, see our PyCon Ghana Recording Release.
Where to submit your proposal
- Sign up for a new gh.pycon.org account by clicking here.
- Head over to your Profile available here and create your profile if not yet created.
- Finally, return to your Profile and you should see our “Submit a new Talk” button!
Due to the competitive selection process, we encourage prospective speakers to submit their proposals as early as possible as it allows for feedback prior to the CFP deadline.
Guidelines for Proposal Submission
The Python Community in Ghana is a relatively new community with an audience of diverse Python experience; from beginners to expert developers. We are therefore looking for talks that will benefit our diverse audience. This means we welcome proposals suitable for beginners, people with somewhat knowledge of Python, very good programmers, and expert programmers.
Everyone who is interested is encouraged to submit a proposal, regardless of experience level. PyCon Ghana thrives on having talks ranging from introductory to advanced. If you are reading this, and you are interested in speaking at PyCon Ghana, we want you to submit a proposal.
For PyCon Ghana this year, talks/workshop revolves around four main categories such as:
General Python, Web/DevOp:
* Web/DevOps: The topics of interest for Web/DevOps include, but are not limited to:
Frameworks (Django, Flask, Pyramid, etc), Background Tasks (Celery, etc), WSGI Orchestration (Ansible, Fabric, etc), Continuous Integration Core & Internals Testing Enterprise.
* Core Python: Suggested topics for this track include, but are not limited to:
Python libraries and extensions, Databases, Documentation, Open Source Python projects, Packaging Issues, Programming Tools, Project Best Practices
General community
* Culture and society - Diversity, health, productivity, workspace issues, privacy, community building, coding for causes
Emerging Technologies;
* Embedded Python and IoT: MicroPython, Python on Hardware, Robotics, Arduino and Raspberry Pi
* Data Science, Machine Learning and AI
* Game Design and 3D Modelling - Python in developing games, 3-D modelling and animation
* Others: Everything else that may be of interest to the audience.
Education
* Academia isn't always sensitive to best practices and current development in technology. Timely revision or adoption of the latest trends and tools in the industry isn't appropriately reflected in our education. How can we address this?
* Python in Education.
and anything else or Experience related to Python you might want to share with us.
Still contemplating what to propose? Anything of interest to the developer community is welcome. Here are a few pointers that can help -
- o Lessons from using Python in your project. Did you find something against conventional wisdom? Something confirming conventional wisdom? Do you have advise for people solving similar problems? Example - I tried Python for video processing, or in my medical imaging project, and here are the lessons.
- o Something you're doing to make the language/ecosystem better. Writing a library to solve an interesting problem? Or have some new ideas on optimisation.
- o Something you learned from a different language that may be useful to Python community. How about a type system? Or patterns from functional programming. Or logic programming maybe?
- o Thoughts on tech culture and living. Ideas on improving diversity and inclusiveness. On programmers’ physical and mental health. On getting better at productivity. On workplace issues. Anything that can make an impact, especially if you have used Python for any of the above or have seen someone using Python.
And if you don't get any ideas along these lines, try plain and simple teaching. Pick up an niche topic (maybe a recent technology, or a scientific paper), and help us learn. A well delivered lecture even at a beginner level is often well received.
Talks
These are the traditional talk sessions given during conferences.
Most talks are 30 minutes long, but we do offer a limited number of 45-minute slots for important topics that promise to benefit from a more extensive treatment. Talks have a 45-minute slot. The talk should be 30 minutes leaving 10 minutes for questions and 5 minutes for moving between venues.
There is no official restriction on the topic that you propose for a talk session. Talks about Python or the Python community are most likely to line up with the interests of PyCon Ghana's audience, and a key consideration that the talk selection committee will be thinking about is your talk’s ability to draw an audience. We observe a limit of one talk per presenter. You may propose more than one, but the committee will ask you to choose only one talk if more than one of your proposals is accepted.
Workshops
As with the talks, we are looking for workshops that can grow our community at any level. We aim for workshops that will advance Python, advance this community, and shape the future. Each workshop runs for 2 hours plus a break for coffee. As workshops are longer, more in-depth than talks, they require much more preparation. Much more when it comes to writing your proposal.
Your Submission
In our experience, attendees pay close attention to proposal abstracts when deciding which talks to attend during the conference. The submitted abstract will be published as is in the conference program (you can edit the submission later).
We encourage you to include details about the theory and/or practice that you will discuss. Specifically, if the system you've built uses open source tools, please mention the libraries in the proposal and make it clear whether you will be presenting a case-study of their use or if you will discuss details of their design.
In general conference attendees, as well as the review committee, should be able to answer these questions based on your submission:
- o What problem is your talk addressing (are you talking about a well known problem or have you found something new during a project)
- o Why is the problem relevant to the audience
- o What is(are) your solution(s) to the problem, or are you simply pointing out the fact there is an issue we should be aware of (this is also extremely useful)
- o What are the main takeaways from your talk. For tutorial submission this is extremely important, please specify what people will have learned at the end of the tutorial session.
NB: This year, in addition to your talk/workshop proposal, we are introducing a preview presentation video during your proposal submission. Preview presentation is you talking about your proposal, topics you intend to cover in the talk, and how you intend to cover them in about 5 mins or less. Participants are strongly suggested to upload links to their preview videos while submitting their proposals. It will be immensely helpful for reviewers to go through preview videos and take that into account before making final decisions on your talk proposal, however, this is optional.
PyCon Ghana is dedicated to featuring a diverse and inclusive mix of speakers in the lineup. Don't hesitate to send in a proposal.
Before submission, you are expected to have read and adhere to the conference Code of Conduct. In particular for speakers: slide content and spoken material should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate, and neither are language or imagery that denigrates or demeans people based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical appearance, disability, or body size.
To Speak at PyCon Ghana, read the Proposing a talk page, sign up and create a speaker profile
Learn more on: Proposing a Talk