Call for Proposals – The Details

This document applies to RustFest Zurich CFP

We are inviting the Rust community to submit talks for our conference! This Call for Proposals will close on July 31st, 11pm CEST. Our CFP process is based on the process used at JSConf EU 2012 and eurucamp 2012-2015. When you’re ready to submit a proposal, visit our CFP submission app and login with your Twitter or GitHub credentials or create an account.

We want to encourage new speakers to get on stage or experienced speakers to try out something new. Never been on stage or thinking about changing the main topic of your speaking efforts? We are your conference!

Topics for Rustfest

Rustfest is a Rust event. We are looking for Rust topics or topics that would interest Rustceans. The Rust community is a very curious one, so talks about interesting new developments in the world of programming are welcome. Topics covering the social aspects of programming are also met with interest. Given the one-day nature of the event, technical aspects of Rust or specific Rust community topics are preferred, though.

We also accept non-talk proposals, like workshops and moderated discussions. You can select your format in the CFP process.

Open slots and chances of acceptance

Rustfest has 8-10 regular speaking slots, depending on the length of the individual talks.

Most slots are open and will be filled through the CFP. Only the keynote speakers are invited.

We also accept workshop suggestions, although we cannot guarantee a number of expected slots here. Feel free to submit a talk and a workshop on the same subject.

We Do Help

There are about a million reasons why you don’t consider yourself a speaker. We are here to prove you wrong. We are your conference, regardless of whether this is your first time on stage or you are an experienced speaker. If you are unsure, feel free to contact us:

We are happy to brainstorm your interests to see if a great topic is hiding.

We are happy to connect you with mentors early on to help prepare your submission, or you can refer to the Example Submission section below for tips.

We are happy to review and advise on how to produce a slide deck.

If you need practice giving talks, get in touch, we can hook you up with local groups or set up a stage for you and a bunch of friends in advance, so you can practice in front of a friendly crowd.

Again, whatever else you might need, we’re here to help.

Get in touch: info@rustfest.eu (just don’t use this to submit a proposal).

If you need more encouragement, check out the following site from Tiffany Conroy, We Are All Awesome that tries to convince you to speak. For guides on the practical parts, see Zach Holmans speaking.io.

Accessibility

RustFests care about accessibility a lot. Please see the details at the main conference page.

The Selection Process

Here is how we select speakers:

Anonymise submissions, so we don’t bias against anything related to the submitter.

Two rounds of voting: The first round rates each talk on a scale from 1 to 10. The top-N (~30) submissions are rated again on a 3-point scale (“meh”, “yay”, “MUST HAVE”).

De-anonymise so we can (finally) bias against speaker details (e.g. to find a mix of seasoned and new speakers). We do want new speakers on the conference, so don't fear losing out to "the pros" in the last minute. If you need travel information or would like to stay with fellow Rustaceans, get in touch with us, we can help you out!

We expect more submissions than speaking slots. The process helps us to select the right ones.

Guidelines

Submit your proposal by July 23th, 23:59:00 CEST. No excuses.

All talks are in English.

Talks are usually 15 or 30 minutes long (for longer talks we’d get in touch with you directly). That includes 3-5 minutes of Q&A. We will be on a tight schedule and enforce the end of a talk rigorously. Please notify us in advance how long you want your slot to be. We suggest timing your presentation in advance.

Make sure you care and make sure we see you care. Typos, sloppy formatting and all-lowercase submissions make our reading of your proposal tedious. These things will definitely count against your proposal.

Don’t overdo it either. If you need more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, we need to ask you to slim things down. With the amount of submissions we get, the quicker you can make a good impression, the better.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” — Blaise Pascal

Original Topics. One of the things we want to do with RustFest is to push the community forward. We can’t do this if the same people keep talking about the same things all the time. Thus, we favour original content. If you want to discuss a topic that you have talked about elsewhere, try to add a twist, or new research, or development, something unique. Of course, if your talk is plain awesome as-is, go for that :)

The Perks

If you get selected as a speaker at RustFest, here’s what you get:

Entrance to the conference. We won’t be done with the speaker selections by the end of the ticket sales, so if you want to make sure you can attend, you may want to purchase a ticket regardless. If you get selected to speak and if you need to, we can refund your ticket, but if you don’t, we can spend more money on making the conference more awesome.

Hotel costs for you and possibly significant other and family, given budget. Please get in contact soon after your acceptance.

Travel coverage of at least 400 Euros for those traveling from Europe, 800 otherwise. Given leftover budget, we will increase coverage. RustFest Kyiv covered the full travel costs. Note that only actual costs will be reimbursed.

If you instead want to stay with fellow Rustaceans, get in touch.

The same goes for travel information!

Example Submission

Here’s a proposal that we accepted on another conference:

How To Be Better A lot of the principles of clean code are forgotten when writing documentation. Have a single source of truth and don't repeat yourself. Avoid writing brittle code. Use ubiquitous terminology and choose searchable names. Be consistent in your formatting. Test your code. Refactor and practice successive refinement. Don't write any more than you need to. These principles of clean code can be applied with great effect to the production and maintenance of documentation, but there's more to it than that. Code needs to satisfy machines and coders. Documentation needs to satisfy people performing range of different tasks: from cursory inspection through to intensive development. This talk will review relevant principles and examine real-world examples, leaving you with a practical mental checklist for writing documentation that will help your users and your software thrive.

Misc

All talks may be recorded, transcribed and published on the internet for free, along with a recording of the slide deck, live-demo or other on-presenter-screen activity.

We do this for the benefit of the larger Rust community and those who can’t make it to the conference. We hope you want to help out, but if you are uncomfortable in any way, let us know and we will work things out.

Finally, since you retain full ownership of your slides and recording, we’d like to ask you to make your materials and recording available under a creative commons (we default to no commercial reuse) or other open source license.