Become a Speaker

Simon on stage at DevOpsDays 2022 - his first public speak. Schooling the community in 'DevOps for Entrepreneurs' click the image to see the full talk

At DevOpsDays we are always on the look-out for speakers that can teach us, inspire us or simply entertain us. We put on talks that balances the cultural and technical aspects of anything DevOpsy. Speakers in our community range from first-time-on-stage talents to top-dog international keynote-for-a-living.

“All accepted speakers and co-speaker will
always be given a full conference pass”

Submit a proposal

Open to All

Our community is non-profit, driven by volunteers and financed by sponsors. And we are a localized chapter (Denmark). This implies, that as a rule of thumb, we do not compensate speakers with actual fees. Instead we will encourage you to pledge your own employer to cover your own expenses. If that is not an option then we may occasionally step in and reimburse expenses like travel and accommodation but typically only within the region of our localized chapter.

Keynote speakers and DevOps Rock Stars

An exception to no-expenses policy is, if you are an invited professional keynote speaker, then we may well accept you usual (friendly) fee — and reimburse even longer travel distances and longer stays.

Mentor or Trainee program

“We will not judge you by lack of speaker experience but by your potential impact”

If you are a novice speaker, with no history to show, you must not hesitate to submit. Don’t be shy. Do it! We will help you!

If your topic is relevant and your urge to speak is strong, then we can offer to appoint you a mentor from among the experienced speakers in our program committee. The mentor will help by reviewing your submission, your narrative, your slides or demo - and give you tips an tricks to calm your nerves and stay relevant.

We can also offer you to utilize our community as a training field, by organizing a pre-run of your speak in a less formal meetup group, in a cozy setting, in front of a smaller audiences, with a facilitated feedback session to wrap it up.

Even if you are not a speaker yet, we will support you to become one.

Speaker’s guild

Join our slack

In our open slack we have a public channel #speakers‑guild that we encourage all speakers to join. In this channel speakers can call always reach out to peers and ask for help, advise and feedback. This channel is also monitored by the mentors, so you will get a reply when you post here.

If you whish to get a speaker mentor - simply post your wish in the channel.

What is a good DevOps Topic

We made an separate story dedicated to that topic: DevOps Evolution. The post also contains a quite extensive glossary of tools, terms, concepts and principles that DevOps encompasses.

The short message is that:

“Maybe we don’t need to define DevOps;
just reflect on what it embraces”

Contemporary DevOps spans so wide, and our community is inherently curious. So if you are in doubt if it fits, then we urge you to go with the benefit of the doubt - it probably fits.

Submit a proposal

Formats

At our annual DevOpsDays conferences we run the following formats:

• Keynotes — 45-90 mins, experienced speaker
• Regular presentation — 30 mins
• Ignite talk — 5 mins, 20 auto-advancing slides, exactly 30 secs on each
• Facilitated Workshop — 30 min workshop, audience of 10-20 people

At the DevOpsDays conferences we also run series of Open Space sessions. The topics for these sessions are suggested and dot-voted for interest at the conference itself. The ones that attract the most interest gets a 30 min slot. All the conference participants then spread out in smaller group settings to the topics that interests them. It’s quite fun. If you have never participated in an Open Space session before you’re in for a treat.

The workshops run in parallel with the Open Space sessions as alternative sessions, but in the same 30 min slots.

The type of presentations is free, and totally up to you - surprise us! I can range from:

• Case study
• Transformational Journey
• Mastery at display
• Running code from stage
• Provocation
• Panel discussion
• F*ckUps
• Perspective
• …surprise us

How to get your proposal accepted

In the early days of the TED organization the accepted speakers were sent a physical stone plate as a prop. It was meant as playful reference to the biblical Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai. But with the deliberate intetn to (lightly) intimidate the speakers with the importance and seriousness with which TED treats the quality of its presentations.

Put some effort into the proposal, this is your first encounter with he program committee — and first impressions lasts. It exemplifies how you present ideas and how you convey information.

We will never reject submissions solely based on the fact they come from a vendor, But be mindful that we generally adhere to the TED commandments and especially commandment VII: “Thau Shall Not Sell From The Stage”.

While we will not accept vendor pitches disguised as talks we would love to see you as a sponsor. You will get you own booth in the venue foyer and from there you can pitch anything you want - no rules, no questions asked.

Become a Sponsor

Training - and MeetUp partners

Among the active members of the DevOpsDays organizer group, we currently either collaborate with, cross-organize or co-host with the following localized MeetUp Groups:

• CPH DevX Café
• Continuous Delivery Users - Copenhagen
• Code Club Copenhagen — 3C
• DevOps Copenhagen
• Aarhus DevOps
• TechHub Aarhus
• Cloud Native Copenhagen

We can effortlessly facilitate and arrange that whatever the format you want to present may be, we can setup a contact to an informal Meetup event to give it a trial run.

If by now you still have questions:

Join our slack