Who's going to Paris? The OpenStack community! The OpenStack Foundation recently launched their rating tool for presentation proposals for the OpenStack Summit in Paris, November 3-7. And you can help set the open source agenda. The chairs for each track get the final say about presentation topics make the cut, but the community gets to actively participate, much like an unconference, by casting votes ahead of time and making their voices heard.

Conference talks range across a wide variety of topics, from core cloud features like networking, storage, and compute, to broader areas like user stories, how to contribute, and related open source projects. We can't list all of them, obviously, as there were several hundred talks proposed.

But here are a few that stood out as particularly interesting to us, with a focus on beginners topics with a broad appeal as well as sessions covering how to build and grow the open source community.

Getting Started with OpenStack: "This workshop will walk participants through an overview of the OpenStack components and offer practical suggestions and resources for learning OpenStack."

An NFV (Network Function Virtualization) primer: "This presentation will explain what we mean by network functions, the issues involved in virtualizing them, give an overview of the relevant open source projects for an NFV platform, the relationship between NFV and SDN, and go through the state of things today, and what you can expect to see in the coming year."

Team Gender Diversity -- Working with the other 50%: "This is a panel discussion with some of the women leaders in the community where we will share ways of encouraging more diversity on teams and tips and tricks on how that can be achieved."

Building the Future with the Community: Delivering Major Features in an Open Source Community: "Between June of 2013 and June of 2014, the OpenStack Swift community designed, built, and delivered storage policies, a major new feature that enables a ton of new use cases for users. This talk will briefly cover the feature implemented, but we'll mostly talk about how contributors from different companies came together and the lessons learned from that experience."

Adopt TripleO tools for your own project: "TripleO makes use of some interesting paradigms, like the use of specialized images or the tight integration with OpenStack Heat. During this presentation, we will give some example of integration and the benefits."

The power of stories: "Feature Stories are human-readable specifications of how a feature works in an assumption-free and non-technical way. It helps everybody on the project, regardless of technical or Python expertise, have a common understanding of what a feature does through the use of examples."

And finally, one more, for which I'm more than just a little biased. Hear about the work we do here at Opensource.com to cover the OpenStack community.

Bringing OpenStack to the Larger Open Source Community: "This talk will attempt to summarize some of the challenges of raising OpenStack awareness, and how we can address them as a community. We will share some lessons learned and best practices based on our experience sharing OpenStack project news and stories at Opensource.com. The goal of this session is to help attendees find, shape, and share their stories, allowing all of us to become stronger ambassadors for the OpenStack project."

To vote in the selection process, you'll need to be a member of the OpenStack Foundation. But signing up as an individual Foundation member is simple and free, so if you're interested in OpenStack and haven't taken the time to do it yet, there's really no excuse.

The polls close at midnight central time on Wednesday, August 6, so right now is the time to make your voice heard. Which talk are you hoping most to hear? Let us know in the comments below.