Call for Speakers

WordCamp Boston is a community event that brings together designers, bloggers, developers, artists, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and educators from all across New England. It’s our mission to have WordCamp Boston represent the passion, talent and diversity of that community, and we want you to be a part of it!

What can you share? Apply to speak at WordCamp!

We’ve included some ideas for topics below, as a bit of inspiration. This is just food for thought, not an exhaustive list: if you have a subject you want to share at WordCamp that we haven’t mentioned, please submit it anyway!

  • How to use WordPress: As a user of WP, what works for you? What tips do you have to share that might help others? How do you choose themes, or plugins? How do you manage a team of editors? What makes your site stand out from the pack?
  • Design: How do you make a beautiful and effective website? What does “responsive” mean, in theory and in practice? How do you manage your design workflow? What does it mean for a site to be usable? How awful are those auto-scrolling banner sliders?
  • Development: How does this all work under the hood? How do you write your own themes or plugins? Why is your site slow, and what can you do about it? What is an object, and why is so much code oriented towards them? What is a unit test? Should you version your code? (yes.) How can WP be integrated with other systems? How did you make something the likes of which have never been seen before using WP?
  • Community: How can you build a forum or website with WordPress? How can you contribute to WordPress itself? What types of contribution can you make if you don’t code? How do you get involved in your local community, whether you’re a designer, writer, photographer or coder? How do you participate in the online open source community?
  • Business, Marketing & Freelance: How do you use WordPress to run your company? How can you build a business around making websites? How did you grow and prosper as a freelance developer? What is SEO, and why does it matter? How should you price your web design work? What do you wish you’d known about working with a distributed team?
  • [insert your own topic here]: The web is constantly evolving, and niche, novel, or notable projects and solutions always make for interesting stories. What projects or experience do you have to share that we didn’t cover here?

Talks for all skill levels will be considered, and a presentation on things you learned setting up your very first website can be just as valuable as a technical walk-through of how user capabilities and roles are implemented within WordPress.

What We Look For

Let’s reiterate that we do NOT require you to be famous, or “expert,” or a programmer, or specifically credentialed, or anything like that. If you haven’t spoken at a conference before, don’t let that hold you back! All we ask is that you be able to present your chosen topic passionately and respectfully.

We do have some general guidelines for talks, though, and here they are: Your talk should be…

  • directly related to WordPress, or immediately applicable and relevant to our audience
  • respectful of the WordPress community, the WordCamp code of conduct, and the GPL
  • something that interests you, that you want to share!

Event Details

  • Talks will be approximately 30 minutes each, so propose a topic you can cover well in that amount of time.
  • Talks will be on Saturday August 23rd.
  • We plan to record all talks and post the videos to WordPress.tv. Speakers will need to sign an A/V release form prior to giving their presentation.
  • Speakers will be offered free admission to WordCamp Boston, but will not be otherwise compensated.

The Call for Speakers deadline is July 18th—don’t wait until it’s too late!

Of note this year, we’re going to do our first round of speaker selection totally blind. Our speaker committee will not know any identifying information about potential speakers until we move into selecting the final list of speakers. We’re hoping this will help remove any unintentional biases and make our speaker selection more reflective of our community.

If you have any other questions, email K.Adam White and/or Kelly Dwan and put “WordCamp” somewhere in the subject line.