Selection Process

The deadline for submissions was April 18. Everyone who submitted a proposal has been notified of whether their proposal was accepted.

We chose a selection of talks and tutorials that we feel add up to the most enjoyable and interesting program for our attendees. Check out our tutorials and talks!

Slide Guidelines

Use Keynote, PowerPoint, Open Office, or Google Presentations for your slides.

Use 4:3 for your slide size (it’s the size of Wharton’s projectors).

Minimal slides are best—avoid walls of text and long lists of bullets.

Be mindful of the colors you use. Aim for high contrast slides, avoiding colors that may be difficult to see for those with colorblindness. (You can check your contrast online; you just need the hex codes for your colors!)

Light background with dark text is easiest to read; be mindful that the projector is white.

Make text as large as possible, at least 68pt.

Choose fonts with adequate spacing between letters, and avoid thin or cursive fonts.

Leave the bottom ⅓ of your slides free of text to ensure nothing is obscured.

Avoid or limit the use of flashing videos or animations/animated gifs, as these may have negative effects for people with seizure disorders, migraines, or ADD/ADHD.

Be careful with memes, images, and GIFs, and make sure they are appropriate for a professional audience.

Your talk should lose nothing if the slides aren’t visible. Generally describe graphs, images, and other information for the audience.

Consider including your Twitter handle on your opening and closing slides!

Consider publishing your slides after your talk (on the platform of your choice) and tweeting the link with the #djangocon hashtag.

Thanks to AlterConf for their amazing speaking recommendations!

Speakers Eat Free!

All speakers and tutorial presenters will receive free tickets to DjangoCon.

Speaker Mentors

Speaking in front of a large audience doesn't come easily to many people. Our conference audiences are full of interesting people with interesting things to say, but who remain in the audience because for whatever reason, they didn't feel confident enough to submit a talk proposal.

If you'd like any help in proposing, preparing or presenting your talk, whoever you are and whatever kind of help you'd find useful, feel free to contact one of our speaker mentors! A speaker mentor is an experienced speaker who has volunteered to help other speakers. For first-time speakers, non-native English speakers, unconfident or uncertain speakers or simply anyone who'd like some help with a talk, here are some people who'd like to help you. You'll get the best results by forming a relationship with one mentor, rather than contacting several.

And if you'd like to be a speaker mentor, let us know!

Recording

Every session at DjangoCon US will have professionally-produced video recordings published to our YouTube channel.

If you do not wish to have your talk recorded, please note this in your submission. Doing so will not influence the selection process in any way.

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are talks under 5 minutes with or without slides on any topic you want! Anything goes, as long as you can keep it under 5 minutes. Sign-ups will happen at the conference.