What is it like submitting an abstract for posit::conf()?

Let's get into it. Okay, in the chat, as Rachel and I are talking, I would love it if anybody who has given a posit.conf talk, maybe a talk anywhere, but if you've given a posit.conf talk or you have submitted an abstract yourself, I would love it if you could share your experiences or just say like, hey, I'm willing to raise my hand and pop in live and share my experiences.

That would be fantastic. Okay, so I'm going to open up the floor here. In the Zoom chat, you don't even need to put it in Slido. You can put it in the Zoom chat if you would like. Any questions about submitting an abstract? And as we get started, I would love it if Megan could go ahead and unmute and share her experiences. Megan's talks are like my favorite posit.conf talks. I feel like they happen almost every year and they're so fun.

Megan's experience submitting and speaking

Can you hear me? Yes. Hello, everyone. Yeah, so the experience. Yeah, I've done three talks in a row, I think starting from like 2023, I think, or 2022. I don't remember. I did three in a row and then I took a year off last year and I did actually submit again for this year. So that'll be fun. Honestly, the process of just doing a talk itself is not as like scary as it might seem. Literally just a 60 second video.

And you just write a little abstract. If you go to like submit, you'll see like the Google form and like you put all your stuff in there. But for me, I never overthought my video. I didn't do any editing. I literally just got my iPhone up and I'm like, all right, let's just do this in 60 seconds.

And I've been lucky and honored enough to be accepted when I submitted. But after you get your acceptance, you do have the articulate speaker coaching sessions, which how many are there, like four or five in total or something like that? It's like four or five in total. It's like spaced out leading up to the conference. And I personally like them, one, because the coaching is really good. There are skills that are transferable that you can take outside of conf. But it also keeps you on task because it's a really long time from like getting your acceptance in March all the way to August or September, whatever conference.

So yeah, but honestly, I've always felt like it was good. I never felt like too stressed or whatever, like in the process of like submitting or like preparing. But yeah, I don't know what else you want me to share. It's always just been

What to include in your submission

that is perfect. And I'm going to like just reiterate a couple of things that Megan said. She just pulled up her iPhone and recorded a video. Yes, that's all you need to do. I would actually really suggest not going overboard and like creating a slideshow or anything. I would recommend putting your voice and your presence into it. And then on the actual page for the call for talks, I'm going to put the link back in the chat one more time.

You will see a little section of bullet points. It's like six bullet points of what we are looking for talks about, right? Have you used R or Python to solve a challenging problem? Tell us about that. Do you have a project or a team where R and Python live together in harmony, where people work on both or maybe it's a team that's just combined R and Python users? You could tell us about your favorite R or Python package and how it makes your life easier or how it unlocks new capabilities. Also your techniques for teaching data science. And this is like always a chunk that I really love at posit::conf. There's always stuff about teaching, reaching new domains, reaching new audiences. There are reflections on data science, packages, code, community broadly.

And then also it's open to anything you could possibly imagine might be interesting. I would say don't even limit yourself to what you think would be interesting. Submit anything because you are much more interesting than you think you are, I promise. And the talks are either 20 minutes or five minutes. 20-minute talk is a full talk. Five-minute talk is a lightning talk. The training that Megan mentioned really is invaluable, right? And it does keep you on track. It keeps you accountable to like keep working on your talk because you have to come to these meetings with other people and have the next step of your, you know, evolution of your talk ready. It prevents this like mad dash at the end of being super, super stressed because you just haven't done anything and you haven't gotten any feedback.

Submit anything because you are much more interesting than you think you are, I promise.

Mike's advice on the 60-second video

The thing I wanted to talk about was the, you know, the video tracing or submission. Don't think of it like you're reading your abstract of the talk, right? It should be kind of an elevator pitch, 60 seconds of what are you going to talk about, why should people care, what will they go away having learned, right? That's much more important than in this talk I will show you blah, blah, blah, right? So that's another reason for not overthinking that 60-second video clip that you send in. But yeah, the whole posit::conf experience is wonderful.

Also, if you engage with the training, you'll get so much out of it in terms of being ready for the day, but also things just as Megan said, things that you can apply in your day jobs as well.

The review process and speaker registration

Fantastic. And Nicholas said to check out examples of great submissions. That's a fantastic idea. You can go click that link that Nicholas just shared and let's hop over to some questions. So Rachel is a little bit more in the know than I am. I am going to forward some of these to her, direct some of these to her, but some of them we might have to just check on and ask. One will be Russ's question, are speakers required to pay a registration fee? And if so, how much is the fee for a speaker? Rachel, you want to take that one?

Sure. Yeah. So I'm part of the conf program committee. So we meet pretty regularly to talk about like who are the keynotes going to be for posit::conf. And then we're also the team that gets to review the talks once they've been reviewed by everybody at Posit. And so I think this is kind of fun to share a little bit about the process. So people across Posit can sign up to review talks. And so everything actually goes to three, I believe two or at least two or three reviewers from Posit. So each person probably gets only about like 10 or so talks to review. And then the program committee only gets to review the ones that have made it into like the top tier of rankings. And then from that point, that's when we get to start to group the talks into the sessions. So when we come up with like the themes and where each talk would would fit in. That's what we do. So I don't get to see every single talk submission. But our team does and multiple people get to review each talk.

And sorry, as I was explaining that Libby, I completely forgot what you were asking me. Are speakers required to pay registration? And no, speakers are not required to pay registration. So every speaker that gets accepted has a free ticket to comp. The only exception where I've seen this is sometimes there's talks where there's two speakers. And I believe for that, we give 50% off for the second speaker. But most talks, it's one one speaker. So that would be the full ticket free.

The 60-second video as a creative exercise

And then there was a non question, a piece of experience that Libby McKenna had shared. Hello, fellow Libby. The video portion might seem like a hassle, but it was actually really fun to make. It's a good creative exercise and got me even more excited about my talk. I agree. I think that sometimes that like the 60 second video part, you're like, oh my goodness, can't I just like type in an abstract and it might feel a little intimidating. I promise it's not too bad. And recording the first draft of your video might actually really help you refine your abstract much more than just typing it out. I don't know. I see some nods from other people like, yes, that's true. It helps because when you realize you have to fit it in in 60 seconds of speaking, you go, oh, I need to be much more succinct because the first one you record might be like three minutes long. So it's very, very helpful.

Speaker training and community

And I can't say enough great things about the speaker training, too. It definitely makes the process feel a lot less scary. Like I hadn't presented at a big conference before when I did my first one a few years ago. And so it was really great to not only have like the consistent training sessions, but to be in a group with other people, because then you already knew a few other people when you're going to the conference, too. So you get paired up with a few other people in your speaker training.

And something fun I forgot to say about the review process is it's actually a Shiny app where everybody gets to review the talks. So every video goes into this awesome Shiny app that Garrick built. And so all of the like ratings and everything goes through that app and all the tagging. So I want us to one day share that app so people can use it for other things at their company, too. Yes. Open source the app, Garrick. I agree. It's very, very cool. And it also kind of like is stateful. It remembers where you were. If you like, I can only review two talks. You can hop back in to where you were, which is very, very cool in a Shiny app.

Mike Smith says, I was in a speaker training session with Joe Chang. How cool is that? Right. I agree. My speaker training that I had, my little group that I had, we stayed together like after we did training together. We were buddies after that and have continued to check on each other. And, and I feel close to them, which I feel really lucky for my little lightning speaker group.

Final questions and closing thoughts

Nicholas had asked, is there any update on the EU conf? I want to encourage some colleagues to begin thinking about a topic, but not sure if it's still going to happen. And I will, I will give this to Rachel, but I will say it is not happening. It is not happening this year, but I appreciate hearing any feedback from everybody about that, that I can pass along as well so that we can continue to consider that for future years.

Yes. And then Russ had asked one more question, which was, Hey, I'm working on a book. Can speakers promote their materials such as books, consulting, et cetera. I think that any talk you give is a walking endorsement for you. And I think, you know, at the end of your talk, if you say, Hey, also, I wrote a book and here it is. I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. And of course, attending a conference in person is a fantastic place to do business networking.

I'll also add that. I think when everybody's reviewing the talks, we're thinking about what is somebody in the audience going to get out of this talk as well. So try and put yourselves in the shoes of somebody who's listening to your talk. And so while I love the talks that are, I love getting to hear like, Oh, I did X, Y, Z, and this was amazing. And this was great because of this, make sure that it's something that someone can take and go apply themselves as well. Yes. Or something that might inspire somebody to do something differently.

I'm going to put a line in the chat right now. That's from the 2026 call for talks blog post. And it says in the video, you should tell us who you are, why your topic is important and what the attendees will take away from it. I think that that is a really, um, a really good sort of like outline for how you could put together your 60 seconds.

In the video, you should tell us who you are, why your topic is important and what the attendees will take away from it.

Okay. Do we have any more questions? I don't think we do. Uh, we are at the top of our 15 minutes. If there's anything that you did not get to ask, head over to LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Libby here in there. I had asked a question about this. You can drop your question in the comments of that post that post so that Rachel and I can reply to it.

Um, okay. Thank you for hanging out with us. Y'all. I really, really hope that you do submit a talk. And as Mike said in the chat, if you are part of the data science hangout crew and you are submitting a talk, you have this built-in cheering squad, right? Hop on the discord. Tell us about your talk idea. I will go make sure that there's a place on discord where we can talk about this, but you could just put it in the general channel. You could put it in the data science hangout channel and we will all support you. I promise the very least I will. I promise. Okay, everybody. Thank you for hanging out. Rachel, any last words?

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize I was muted. Something I just wanted to add. Um, if you've seen somebody is like LinkedIn post or a blog that they wrote and you're thinking that would be a great talk, or I'd love to learn more from that person. I encourage you to tell them because I think sometimes like we don't think that we have like a good idea for a talk until somebody like asks us a question about something or tells us they would want to learn more. Um, and so I just want to make sure that we're all the people who do that for others as well.

Heck yeah. Definitely go be that encouraging person. I absolutely believe that all of you will be because you're hangout crew people and that's what we do. Okay, everybody. I will see you on Tuesday, perhaps where Isabella and I will be at the lab talking about collaborating and GitHub for Quarto. I will see you next week at the data science hangout where we have Bridgesh Chajerla. He is going to be so much fun to talk to and he's a data science hangout regular himself. So I'll see you on Tuesday. Have a good weekend. Bye everybody.