June 21, 2018 Anne-Sophie Bachelard

As we announced our mentoring program for speakers a few days ago, we decided to extend our CFP deadlines to enable everyone to submit a talk proposal on time. We don’t want you to miss the occasion to speak at a Symfony conference. You can now submit a talk proposal for SymfonyLive London and SymfonyCon Lisbon until June 25th!

We would like to thank all the people who already submitted a talk proposal, we received a lot of very good talk proposals, that's really great, thank you all! But we'd like to raise the talks submission to the entire community and enable potential new speakers to submit. For example, at this year's edition of SymfonyLive Paris conference, 30% of the speakers were brand new speakers, people who never spoke at a Symfony conference before or never spoke at all at a conference before. It was their first time on stage and their talks were awesome! They did it so well!

We thus would like the entire Symfony community to spread the word about our CFP to make sure that no one will miss this opportunity! We also encourage you to tell us who you think will be the best to speak at the conference about a specific topic or just because you think their Symfony experience must be shared to everyone. Or just tell us what topics you're eager to listen to. This year, it's more than a Call for Papers it's a Call to the Community! Either you or someone else can be a speaker at a Symfony conference.

We created the mentoring program for speakers from the perspective of helping all the new speakers to take the plunge. How does it work?

This program is aimed to help unexperienced and experienced speakers who want to speak at our conferences. You have an idea but you don’t know how to outline it or you even don’t know where to start, then you can count on us to help you. We help you from scratch! It all starts with your motivation! If you’re motivated to speak on stage and have a Symfony experience to share or best practices or tips, don’t hesitate to submit a talk proposal. Unexperienced speakers are more than welcome! The mandatory requirement is that you need to speak comprehensible English (well of course, another very important requirement is that your talk idea must be about Symfony). We’ll help you create your talk content and train yourself to speak on stage. Our team will review your talk and we’ll organize online training sessions to listen to your talk. Several rehearsals can be organized, we want to make sure you feel pleased and confident about your talk.

If you think that speaking on stage is not for you yet, you can anyway contribute to our CFP! Tell us in the comments of this blog post what topics or speakers you want to see on the schedule. This will help us during the speaker selection to create the conferences’ schedules.

Submit now a talk proposal for SymfonyLive London, SymfonyCon Lisbon until June 25th and SymfonyLive USA until July 8th.