And now for some Golden Gate RubyConf news. Yes, we are hard at work getting ready for GoGaRuCo 2011. If you haven't heard yet, the dates are September 16-17, and we'll be back in the same wonderful venue we had last year, UCSF Mission Bay. One of the changes we're making this year is that we are moving away from a fully curated program and are doing an open Call For Proposals for talks.
The CFP has been open for a little while and has about a week left. However, it looks like I haven't done a good enough job publicizing the CFP, since we haven't gotten the number of proposals we wanted to see. As this is my first time running a CFP, it's a learning experience (organizing a conference is full of those!), and I think I was a little weak on promoting the CFP. So this week I'm going to turn up the volume on CFP publicity, and I'm also extending the deadline by a week to give some extra time for people just hearing about it. The new deadline is midnight Pacific time on Saturday, June 25.
Want to submit a talk proposal? Use the online form.
And a bit of guidance about talk content... Remember that nearly all our attendees use Ruby daily, so talks should be for an audience of intermediate or advanced Rubyists. Non-Ruby topics are acceptable if they are somehow related to Ruby, or just seriously awesome. A 100% JavaScript talk is unlikely to be accepted, but a talk about testing JavaScript in your Rails app would be fine. We'd love to see some talks on using new features in Rails 3 and 3.1, experience reports about how you kicked ass in your Ruby project, integrating with other languages, new tools and libraries, working with the Ruby ecosystem, and how you changed the world using Ruby. Or just blow our minds with something amazing.
Also, help promoting this CFP would be greatly appreciated. If you know someone you'd like to see speak, please pass along the announcement and encourage them to submit a proposal.
By the way, RubyThere.org has a list of open CFPs for a good number of Ruby conferences. If you run a conference, please add your CFP to the list. If you're a potential speaker, check it out and submit some proposals!
And finally, if you need any encouragement to speak at GoGaRuCo, let me just say that we love our speakers. Speakers get to attend for free, get some special swag (last year we had hoodies), and get wined and dined at our speaker appreciation dinner. We also give you a Speaker Alumni discount to attend GoGaRuCo in future years, so you can keep coming back a bit more easily.
Go now and propose!
