devopsdays Chicago - Propose

Call for proposals opens Monday, Mar 19, 2018.
Call for proposals closes Friday, Jun 1, 2018.
Selected proposals will be announced on Friday, Jun 15, 2018.

There are three ways to propose a topic at devopsdays:

  1. A 30-minute talk presented during the conference, usually in the mornings.
  2. An Ignite talk presented during the Ignite sessions (scheduling varies). These are 5 minutes slots with slides changing every 15 seconds (20 slides total).
  3. Open Space: If you’d like to lead a group discussion during the attendee-suggested Open Space breakout sessions, it is not necessary to propose it ahead of time. Those topics are suggested in person at the conference. If you’d like to demo your product or service, you should sponsor the event and demo it at your table.

General Guidelines:

  • Be concise.
  • Add as much detail as you can.
  • Multiple entries are welcome.
  • Attempt to not give details to who you are, we prefer to judge based on content.
  • All presentations must conform to the code of conduct.
  • Preferably submit via our CFP site, however, we also will accept submissions by email: [proposals-chicago-2018@devopsdays.org ]

Ideas:

This is what we would like to know. Do you have an answer?

  • DevOps movement has been around for a few years now: Did anyone find out if it really helped your organization? Are there numbers for this?
  • Did the culture of DevOps spread to other parts of your company? If not, why?
  • Is DevOps the magic silver bullet which solved all your problems? What are the problems it didn’t solve (although you thought it would)?
  • Were there unexpected problems during your cultural change into DevOps?
  • Did the required skill-set of people change after starting to do things DevOps-Style?
  • Did people leave because you “went DevOps”? Was this good or bad or both?
  • Have there been technical changes after the culture in your team changed?
  • Did the change affect the business/sales/marketing side?
  • And of course: Has DevOps affected you personally? How do you feel about the change it brought to your work?

The “classic” DevOps questions are of course not fully answered, either…

  • What is the role of QA/Tester in DevOps, how do we integrate QA in the continuous delivery process
  • The impact DevOps has on traditional security/auditing/change control
  • The impact of DevOps on HR policies, and the hiring process
  • Help prove that DevOps can scale beyond the 5-8 person web startups, we love traditional IT enterprise cases
  • With all the automation, data is still a hard thing to handle, how does it affect DBA’s, backup strategies, …

If you’d like some more specific topic examples…

  • How about release management.
  • Integrating security into the DevOps conversation
  • How to handle budgets for DevOps initiatives
  • DevOps and Working Remotely
  • Value Stream Mapping
  • Having DevOps make #monitoringsucks less

Our main criteria to make it to the top selection are: - Original content: Content not yet presented at other conferences, or a new angle to an existing problem - New presenters: People who are new to the space and have insightful stuff to say; we want to hear everybody’s voice - Open Space Fodder: Will this talk help generate discussion during the Open Spaces? - No vendor pitches: as much as we value vendors and sponsors, we just don’t think this is the right forum. You can demo at your table or during Open Space.

Even more tips

  • We like stories over theory. Examples of what your organization has done are fantastic.
  • You don’t need to write out the entire talk in your abstract, but please provide sufficient detail for the selection committee to get a feel for what your talk will include. Show, don’t tell.
  • Remember that this is a single-track conference - getting too deep into the weeds of a specific technology might make the content less accessible to all attendees. However, we will consider talks of this nature if they provide something special.

How to submit a proposal: How to submit a proposal: Visit our CFP Site and submit a proposal there. If you run into any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us by email at [proposals-chicago-2018@devopsdays.org ].

  1. Type (presentation, panel discussion, ignite)
  2. Proposal Title (can be changed later)
  3. Description (several sentences explaining what attendees will learn)