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jazzyk

There is a big elephant in the room here:

Most conferences have been converted to strictly money-making entities.

Here is how it works:

- a RFP is published

- you submit

- you get a response: "Unfortunately, your proposal did not get accepted, however, we have a limited number of time slots for sponsors. If you become a silver sponsor..." In other words, you can submit any crap, as long as you provide "sponsorship".

This may or may not apply to DevOps Days, I don't know enough about it. Also, the above does not invalidate some good points made by the author regarding selecting the right angle of the presentation, etc.

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Although conferences are hard work to put on, and I certainly don't want to imply that the organizers don't deserve to be paid well, I've noticed a large rise in other types of (sleazy) money-making conferences as well.

I've been cold-called by several conferences before (not totally unusual, I've spoken at a few large ones, and my name's out there) where they ask me to speak, but "don't have the budget" for payment and don't reimburse or offer a stipend for travel costs. Unsurprisingly, they charge hundreds of dollars for admission, have extremely cheap venues, and a somewhat lackluster roster of gullible "expert speakers."

Sure, there's a large gray area between "not a very good conference" and "scammy ripoff" but it's another thing to watch out for.

It's worth noting that many prestigious genuine conferences do not reimburse speakers and charge them for a full price ticket as well.

For example, all the ACM conferences.

I actually like this - everyone contributes to the costs, and speakers are just attendees like everyone else.

I've seen people get extremely irate when they see this, saying it's a scam, but at many conferences speakers are just normal attendees like anyone else.

Can't comment on the ACM conferences.

But for most conferences, interesting speakers provide the whole value of the conference - it is what attracts attendees. Therefore, organizers make decent money off of speakers, so no, they are not like regular attendees.

I think the organiser of the conference is providing the value to the speaker, not the other way around. They're providing a platform for the speaker to talk about their project.

Really? My mental model is that the value of the conference lies entirely in network effects. That is, it's valuable for people deep in topic X to go to a conference for X because they expect many other people who are also deep in topic X to go to that conference. The speakers are just a means to an end, to get the initial core group interested and start the quadratic snowball going.

I've never seen that. Has anyone else?

I've had talks rejected from places even where we were sponsoring.

I've seen that in every gaming competition I've ever entered. Which is probably over twenty at this point.

I have seen talks rejected from places where we were silver sponsor. But that being said, most conferences I go to the platinum/gold sponsors are all over the tracks. Even if they don't know a lick about the topics.

Good point, even for non-sponsored talks, they may have an agenda which is based towards certain topics that cover certain technologies for certain companies, you get the point.

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