Conference CfP And Submissions


Published on January 15, 2025 by Stefanie Janine Stölting

PostgreSQL postgres submission submissions conference CfP talks talk

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As I have been on several CfP committees (CfPC) for PostgreSQL conferences, I like to share my experiences.

Submissions

When you submit more than one talk, think about the additional work of the CfPC. Every member has to read almost all submissions and to vote for each one of it. The exceptions are the ones they submitted themselves or the ones submitted by coworkers.

All the members of CfP committees of PostgreSQL community conferences are doing their duty mostly without compensation, sometimes they are offered a free ticket to the conference.

Therefore also keep your abstract as short as necessary and to the point. You don’t gain anything with a long text, which includes many unnecessary details. Keep in mind that the abstract is not only used by the CfPC, but also later shown on the website and is the deciding factor for conference visitors to go to your talk. The same goes for the description about you.

When you gave a talk on a one track conference in the previous year, think about submitting at all. The content of your talk has to be exceptionally above other talks, by abstract and topic.

After Voting

When the voting by each CfP member for each submission has been done, usually meetings are scheduled to select and create a good program for the conference. The speakers who have been approved are getting emails to reconfirm their talk.

Some acceptances take longer, as the selected speakers have to ask for getting the attendance sponsored.

There have been some speakers, who didn’t get their talk financed by their companies. Now they have a couple of choices. Decline to give their talk, find another sponsor, or giving their talk financing their travel costs themselves, or ask the organizers for funding.

In the latter two choices, I would advice to update the talk slides and remove everything mentioning their employer, they haven’t earned to be mentioned.

Declined talks have to be replaced. The CfP committee has again to decide which other talk to approve. The circle of waiting for acceptance starts again.

In addition, there are backups necessary for cases when a speaker can’t attend due to illness or missed/cancelled flights. We call this a “reserve list talk”. Usually, but not always, such talks are selected from speakers who already have a talk accepted. This increases the chances that the speaker is already on-site.

Those reserve list speakers choosen also have to accept to attend the conference. That is much harder for a one day single track conference as most speakers only plan to appear in case of giving their talk. Their employers often decline funding.

To reduce the work of CfP committees you could ask your employer before you submit a talk, or fund the travel costs yourself.

After the speakers have accepted, the next duty is to plan the schedule. It is obviously much easier for single track conferences. With multi-track conferences it has to be decided which talks will be held parallel.

Guidelines

The PGEU Diversity Committee, where I have been honoured to be a member, is currently working on guidelines for CfP committees.

The current status is draft, but it has been decided to share the draft with current CfP committees.

When the guidelines are finished they will be published accessible to everyone.

My Experiences

In the last five years I have been honoured to be on several CfP conferences. The last two ones have been PGDay MED in Napoli and the upcoming Nordic PGDay in Copenhagen. The work for Nordic is still ongoing.

The number of submissions usually differ because of location, dates, and whether it is a one track one day conference or a multi track conference.

For the Nordic PGDay we had exactly 100 submissions. And that is a one track conference, it has only eight slots for talks.
Your chance of getting a slot is 8 %, or 1:12.5.

The last PGConf EU in Athens had 415 submissions for a conference with four slots and lasting three days. The chances your talk was accepted have been much higher here, 22.4 % have been accepted, that is a chance of 1:4.46.

The chances of getting your talk accepted are much higher on multi day/track conferences. But the work of the CfP committees is much more.

PGDay MED in 2024 has been the only conference where I submitted a talk while being a CfP member. The reason was that there was not a single submission by a woman and I was asked if I could submit a talk.

Call for Papers - Where Get To The Infos

There are several sources to stay informed about upcoming conferences and when their call for papers end.

Mailing List:

There are a several mailing lists by postgresql.org available.

LinkedIn

Several PostgreSQL community conferences in Europe have their own account in LinkedIn:

Mastodon

Some also have a Mastodon accounts:

Public Calendars:

Currently there are two sources public calendars available. The one handled by enthusiasts has conference and CfP dates mixed, the one handled by ProOpenSource has one for conferences and another one for CfPs.

You can subscribe to the Google calendars linked on these pages and never miss a date.


This post has been reviewed and corrected by Andreas Scherbaum who is also handling https://postgresql.life/. I am very grateful for his work.



Author: Stefanie Janine Stölting