What we are looking for

We are looking for talks about your work in the world of Ruby and Rails or tech and the broader community.

Have you built something you were proud of, spent time working out the best way to achieve something, overcome hurdles at work or learned something new that you want to share? We’d love to hear about it!

If you want to get a feeling for the sort of talks we are interested in hearing, take a look at our programme for the past few years: 2018, 2017, 2016.

The selection process

We want a diverse lineup of speakers from different backgrounds, genders, sexualities and ethnicities, speaking on a wide range of topics. To help us accomplish this, here is the process for submitting and reviewing talk proposals for RubyConf AU 2019.

1. Submission: Submit your talk through Papercall (this ensures proposals are private) before 11:59 PM AEST on October 15th. Please include as much information as you can to give your talk the best opportunity to be selected. There is opportunity to enter information that won’t be publicly displayed.
2. Shortlisting: A group of 3-4 reviewers, with diverse backgrounds and experience levels, will read through all anonymised talk proposals. They will shortlist roughly double the amount of required talks.
3. Selection: The reviewers and organisers will trim this shortlist to the required number of talks, with a buffer in case selected speakers withdraw. To increase speaker diversity and experience, proposals at this step will be de-anonymised. We believe this is necessary to ensure that our lineup is as varied as possible and better represents our broader society.
4. Notification: Selected speakers will be notified via email. We aim to have all speakers selected before October 29th. Submitters of unsuccessful proposals will also be notified by email.

Pro tips

Presenting a talk at RubyConf AU is an awesome opportunity to engage with the Ruby community. To help increase your chance of having a talk accepted, here are some ‘pro-tips’.

• Successful submissions in the past years have been detailed, focus on contemporary experience, applicable beyond a single implementation, considered diversity in viewpoints and personal background, and described novel experiences or developments in the chosen topic.
• If your talk is more general and not specifically about Ruby, then we prefer the talk to be language agnostic.
• We carry out an anonymised review process. To help us maintain a fair process, we ask that you please leave out any identifying information.
• We welcome multiple talk proposals per speaker, selecting a maximum of one talk per person. So please submit away!

Perks

Selected speakers will receive a ticket to the conference. If you are selected and have already purchased a ticket, you will be refunded the amount that you paid. Additionally, speakers not from Melbourne will receive:

• 4 nights of accommodation in a nearby hotel.
• Up to $2000 AUD reimbursement for economy travel costs.

We want speakers to be as involved with all the conference events as they wish to be. If you are from around Melbourne but travel to the event would make that difficult we are open to providing accommodation too.

Please note that Ruby Australia is a not-for-profit organisation. If you have a company willing to cover your travel and hotel expenses instead of us covering these costs, we will include them as a sponsor of the conference.