Speaker Applications Tips & Expectations

We’re grateful for your interest in helping us put on a top-notch event for the WordPress community in Greater Phoenix!

We have a few tips and expectations (do’s and don’t’s) for speakers we’d like to share with you to help you craft your submission.

Please do submit on a topic you’re passionate about! You need not be an expert, but we hope you have a compelling story to tell and skills to share.
Please do check spelling and grammar in your application, particularly brand names like WordPress, WordCamp, etc.
Please do craft your Talk Title & Description to be publishing-ready! Unless we reach out to you to discuss, your submission will be published and printed as-is.
Please do allowlist our email phxwordcamp [ at ] gmail [dot] com to make sure you can get emails from us. (What is allowlisting?) All correspondence will come from that email.
If accepted to speak, you will be asked to join the Slack channel shortly following accepting your invitation. All key communication between our team and speakers happens in Slack prior to the event.
Speakers are expected to attend the full event and be available to speak on both days. If you have a special circumstance that requires you to speak on a certain day, please send an email to our speaker wrangler at phxwordcamp+speakers [ at ] gmail [dot] com .
Keep in mind, we’re all volunteers. No one is getting paid by the event to participate, and we’re all volunteering our time. 🙂
Honor and promote the Code of Conduct. We aim to create an event that is safe and comfortable for everyone and adherence to the Code of Conduct helps us create a safe space for all attendees.

Please don’t include profanity or adult themes in your submission. We’re a family-friendly event.
Please don’t play into ugly and unfair stereotypes (ie.”so easy [this group of people] can do it!”)
Please don’t bad mouth code languages, companies, products or people. There are all kinds of needs and solutions in this world.
Please don’t feel bad if your talk isn’t selected! We receive many high-quality submissions and building the schedule is incredibly difficult because we have to deny so many great speakers and sessions. Please apply again or contact us about presenting at local Meetups!

Your chances are improved if you submit more than one proposal — sometimes we get a lot of submissions on one topic, so if you submit a variety of talks, it’s easier to include you. Please do not submit more than two (2) talks. We will only consider the two most-recent talks you’ve submitted.
Consider reviewing past WordCamp Phoenix schedules to see the style and format of titles, descriptions and topics we’ve picked.

Now that we’ve outlined our expectations for you, here’s what you can expect from us:

We meticulously review each and every submission. This includes online research (professional presence, social media, interviews, search results and more), review previously submitted talks to WordCamp Phoenix and other publicly-available talks and materials.
Our review process happens in two stages. First, our organizing committee will review and score each application without identifying information. Final selection of sessions is made after reviewing the complete application. None of these ratings, comments and discussions are ever shared outside our committee and won’t be shared with applicants.
Our organizers meet, review talks that scored well, discuss trends and common themes and begin to build a schedule.
We wish we could accept everyone, but we’ll email everyone we unfortunately won’t be able to accept after speakers are confirmed. Please don’t assume you’re not our first choice or not selected just because someone else you know heard back already — we contact speakers in waves.