How to write the perfect CFP (with or without AI)

Moran: Hi everyone. Hey, so you've crafted a brilliant idea for a tech talk, perhaps even build a presentation around it. Yet, despite all efforts, you keep getting that discouraging. Now from conference organisers year to year, could it be that you're just approaching it incorrectly? What if I told you there are measurable, actionable steps you can take to take your brilliant idea out of your head and to the stage? So, hi everyone. My name is Juan Weber. I'm the CEO and founder of Women On Stage. Women On Stage is a public speaking training platform for professional women in tech to take the stage, share their knowledge, and inspire others to grow. In my previous background, I have 10 years of experience working as a software engineer. I was mainly working for ws. And other than that, I'm also a social psychologist, mainly have a master's degree in social psychology.

And I'm here today to share with you some of my best tips on how to write a compelling CFP or conference submission that will actually help you to get your foot in the door and get accepted into major tech conferences worldwide after reviewing and editing hundreds of those in the past few years as part of my work at Women on Stage. So the first transfer, what is A CFP anyway? So A CFP usually stands for call for papers or call for proposals. And in most cases we use the term CFP, both for the open call for papers the conference is calling for and also for the part where we submit the actual submission. So you might say, I just submitted A CFP to Darl K, or my CFP was just accepted to Darl Khan. In this workshop today, we're going to review some of my best guidelines and tips for writing the compelling CFP that will get your foot in the door in major conferences worldwide.

So this session is going to be divided into three sections. First, we're going to discuss we how we choose a topic, how do we spark our creative mind, and where do we find inspiration? Later we are going to discuss what a good CFP actually entails. It includes the title, the abstract and bio, and I'm going to share some guidelines on how to write those. And later you will get a chance to craft your own and try to play with it a little bit. So how do we choose topic? Where do we find ideas? So many people often say, I don't have anything interesting enough to share. I don't have anything important enough to say everything was already done before. I don't have anything original to say. So let me, I cannot stress this enough. Sorry, I cannot stress this enough. You already have your own unique experiences, your own unique perspective, your own unique stories, and you have tonnes of interesting insights to share.

But the most important thing to remember is that you have to choose something that makes you passionate, that sparks your creative mind. And one problem that we often have is what I call is a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge is when we know a lot of stuff and we do a lot of stuff on our day-to-day work. And because of that, we think everyone knows the same thing too, know the same things. So a problem. The problem is, is that we don't always know what we know and we don't always know what our audience doesn't know. So it's really important when you submit A CFP, you have to know your audience, you have to know who they are, what they're looking for, and usually the session that will vary according to the session. The session length will vary according to how deep you want to go, and it's okay to assume prior knowledge, but you probably want to aim to the majority of your audience, approximately 80% of your audience.

But the most important thing to remember is that you must create value for your audience. You have to remember that it's not about you, it's about them. So even if you are trying to sell something, or even if you're trying to market your product, you can't be too blunt about it. You have to shift your focus from trying to sell something into communicating with your audience into providing them actual knowledge and actual value at sharing your knowledge with them. So you have to do that shift in your focus into communication. So where do we come up with ideas? How do we spark our creative mind? I want to be clear here that even the most trivial ideas, even the most common knowledge ideas can also be creative. And I want to give a little example of someone I know who used to be a junior developer and she wrote a blog post about the difference between synchronous programming, async programming, and parallel programming.

It's not a very, very, very sophisticated kind of thing, but she brought her own unique self and created a drawing of explaining the difference between those. And her blog post was shared all over, even by really senior people on Twitter, and it was a huge, huge success because she's brought something unique and different to the table. So how do we come up with ideas? I want to give you a list of things that might spark your creative mind. So people and developers in particular are usually very interested in hearing about real life stories, real life case studies, and they want to learn about the challenges you face. They want to learn about how you encountered a problem and how you solved it. They don't want to hear about how everything was always perfect. They want to learn about a journey, about a struggle and how you solve that particular problem.

They want to learn about a comparison between, you can use comparison, some tools between frameworks, between methodologies, and you can play with the title like a mobile native or react native. That is question. You can always do an intro session for one particular domain into another domain, for instance, into machine learning for web developers. So that might create a lot of value for them. And it seems like it's junior for machine for data scientists, but it's really, really important web developers, especially these days, you can showcase a special project or a product that you made. And we previously had someone on our courses who had a session about how she's using NLP to identify potential suicides. And it was really, really, really interesting. You can explain how a framework is working under the hood and people always really like it when we are busting myths about something.

For instance, busting myths about women in tech or learning to code, not like you thought. Another thing that I personally really, really, really like is creating a fusion between supposedly unrelated domains. For instance, what I learned from being a musician about lingo. So if you have a hobby or something or something that you do really that's really special to you, you can combine it with your day-to-day work. And that's always very, very, very interesting. You can talk about the evolution of something or the future of LLMs, for instance, you can use a known phrase or a TV show that you like or a movie. We previously had someone who did a talk about web vulnerabilities as media characters. It was hilarious, okay? And people love that. Three tips for doing something or best practises for designing an API. Lessons learned from doing something repeatedly. Okay, I bet that most of you don't know how many lines of code you previously read or how many lines you've previously written because you don't really follow those numbers.

But if you check them on gida and you add a title called lesson learned from reviewing 10,000 lines of codes, it suddenly sounds like, wow, I did all of that and it's really impressive. And lastly, do's and don'ts. For instance, the seven deadly scenes of onboarding engineers. So a few, great going next, I'm going to give you some real examples of graduates we had in our courses. These are all very, very cool. Stop confusing me with confusion matrices using visual tools to improve communication, how to party with third party APIs. Shadow dome is coming out of the shadows, the secret sauce of data, pre-processing in machine learning, all these but goodies. Why classical machine learning, steel rocks, why I stopped hating Python. So it's always like a little bit of a click pay, but it's not to achieve. Think as a platform, build your own leather model, connecting historical data to improve models accuracy or fun with three, get to the root of some classification.

Okay, so I hope I gave you a few ideas on how to find inspiration, where to find inspiration for choosing your title and choosing your topic. Now let's talk about the CFP itself and what does it entail. So once again, CFP stands for a call for papers or a call for proposals, and it usually includes the following, the title, the abstract, and your personal bio. Now let me tell you a little secret. Many people invest a lot of time perfect thing, their presentation without ever knowing if they have the proper stage to deliver it. So you don't need to create the entire presentation before you actually get accepted because sometimes different conferences will have different guidelines and different things that they're interested in different lengths. So you don't need to create the entire thing first, just create the CP. Just create your submission and then you can try and see what happens next.

Let's talk about the title. First impressions really matter, okay? Imagine yourself coming to this conference today, okay? We have a few multiple tracks at the same time. Now, how do you choose where to go? You look at the title, you don't look at the entire abstract, you don't check out on the speaker. Sometimes you do, but usually you just look at the title and by the title you decide where you want to go. So conference organisers do the same thing. Imagine you are getting hundreds of submissions from people all over the world, all over the world, and then they need to decide, they need to screen somehow, which will be the best talk, which will be the best talk to choose. So they decide, usually decide based on the title only if the title is interesting enough, they will go on and read your abstract and read your bio and do a little checkup on you.

But the title is really, really, really important. And I want to show you with a little example of another cognitive bias called the primacy effect. So what is your perception on someone? Let's say we have someone who's intelligent, ambitious, impulsive, critical, stubborn or envious and envious, versus someone who's envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, ambitious, and intelligent. Ooh, that's good. So you like that better? Definitely the first two. But those are the same characteristics, exactly the same characteristics. So the order doesn't really matter, but we just read the first one and then we decide if we like them or not. Going next, let's see a few examples of do's and don'ts for the title. So like the examples I gave you before, I like to call it the clickbait part, but it is a clickbait in the sense where you want to grab their attention, but you don't want it to be too cheap.

So a few nice examples for that is this one is a talk. I have seven plus minus two reasons psychology will help you write better code. So the seven plus minus two is an interesting number. I'm curious to learn more about it. And then it will make me want to read more. I will share with you the abstract of that talk shortly, or Daddy, where's my Arduino? And that talk is actually for a colleague of mine who gave this talk with his 12-year-old daughter and they talked about how they're building Arduino projects together. It was amazing. Okay, so the title also has to be very accurate and very descriptive. We need to really understand what it's about in a sense like, okay, so slay the dragon, how to rewrite a monolith into microservices and stay alive or show you the garbage understanding garbage collection. And the other side of that is that we don't want it to be too vague, okay? So we need to know what's it's about. For instance, lessons I've learned in my life that might be interesting, but I have no idea what's it about and I need more context or everything you need to know about the cloud.

I'm sure that's not everything I need to know about the cloud. I need more context here. Or machine learning fundamentals. Okay, that's a really, really huge thing. I need more context here so it can't be too vague. The abstract, the abstract is usually a short paragraph. On average it is between 120 to 200 words. And once again, it starts once again like the title. We have the primacy effect for the abstract as well because the first two lines or the way you start your abstract has to be the clickbait part or the TLDR once again like we having the title. So it will help you decide if you want to read further or not. So the first part of the abstract, which is called, once again, it's based on the primacy effect. Its goal is to loop you into the topic on a higher level.

Okay? So once again, you need to make it appealing. It can be like a short quote or short story. I will share an example soon and afterwards you drill into the topic with the body of the abstract and then you give a little more insight about the problem, about the use case, about the problem that you are dealing with. And you really need to answer the question, why does it matter? Why should we care why it's important? And the last part of the abstract is the what's in it for me? Okay, what are you going to talk about exactly? And especially what are the key takeaways you're going to give to your audience? So people will say something like, in this talk I will demonstrate, I will discuss, I will explain, or by the end of my talk you'll be able to. So let us see an example of that.

Remember the seven plus minus two reasons psychology will help you write better code. Okay, so let's start with the clickbait part or with the Prius effects part. During the Cold War, the CIA knew how to expose Russian spies disguised as American citizens with 100% certainty. They used only a piece of paper and a few questions. How did they do that? Hacking your mind is easier than you think. Okay, I didn't even mention code, but I got you intrigued. I got you interested in learning more and then I drilled down into the topic. Let's explore how these mental hacks affect the code we all read and write. We'll take a stroll through the world of cognitive psychology and set and shed some light on some of our industries best and worst practises. And the last part, the what's in it for me? We'll have a few interactive examples of our mind's limitations, examine how these limitations manifest themselves and read in real code samples and engineering practises and take away scientifically backed techniques on how to write better code.

Let's see another example. The daddy wear my Arduino, it's almost midnight. Me and my daughter are looking for jumpers, mattresses, and resistors. There is a bug in the game we're building and it doesn't seem as if you're going to bed anytime soon. So this is a great example because he's not saying, me and my daughter like to build our duino project. He's not really saying that. He tells a story and it helps us be there with them at midnight, which is really, really, really cool. Then he drills down into the topic teaching kids recursion and data structures didn't create thrill, life body work, but building games does. My daughter Ronnie, and I'll talk about introducing kids to the world of programming 3D, printing, scratch, Arduino, all express orders and hot glue. And then the what's in it for me, what they're going to talk about exactly. We'll cover the existing tools from which kids can learn how to code, at what age should they start and which projects to choose and why Girls at schools are anxious about coding. Is it a boys club already before high school? This is also really cool because he's ending with a question and that question makes us want to learn more. We are curious. He doesn't give away the answer to that question. And then we really want to do that talk.

Any questions by the way? Okay, let's go on. So the bio bio is also a short paragraph between 120 to 200 words and it should include three major parts in it. The order doesn't really matter this time, but you do want to include all of these. It should say who you are professionally, your current, your past experience, your education and so forth. It should answer the question, why are you the relevant person to be given this talk and this particular section? Can you wait according to the conference that you're submitting to? And for instance, sometimes you want to have a constant bio and you want to change one particular sentence about why you are the relevant person to be given this stock. For example, if I were to get accepted with this particular talk about writing CFPs, I would say that my formula has previously helped dozens of people get accepted into tech conferences, but it doesn't have to be there always.

So it depends on which talk I'm actually submitting. And the last part, many people often neglect because they don't think it's important enough because they want to stay strictly professional, is that it has to include something personal, something fun, something memorable about you. Maybe you're a cat person or that you really, really like creating mims or gifts or whatever. But adding dough will give you a little extra flavour and usually organisers and the audience as well will particularly remember those parts. Okay? Not your professional background. So this part is a little embarrassing to me, but I will read my own bio now and because I have to practise what I preach. Okay? So Moan Weber is the CEO and founder of Women on stage. She's formerly tech lead weeks with tenures of experience in software development. In addition, she's a social psychologist holding a master's degree in social psychology along with a bachelor of degree in computer science and psychology from ta.

So this is who I am professionally, my professional background, my education and so forth. Something personal about me, which is not so fun this time, but something personal about me in the past, one suffered from severe stage fright and toxic syndrome. Her path of overcoming these anxieties included stepping up to as many stages as possible and becoming anno speaker and speakers trainer. So this particular sentence is something that I frequently use, but especially in use that when I speak about stage fright or overcoming stage, right? Because it's relevant to that particular discussion and why am I the relevant person to be given this topics once again, especially when it's about the stage, right? Or how I'm advocating for women. By the way, all of these are our health performance as well obviously.

So her unique background is software developer, social psychologist, and as a woman in tech grove her to embarkment a mission to amplify women's voices everywhere. So this part is especially relevant when I speak about women on stage and why I do the things that I do and why I care about it. Okay, going next and something about the bio, okay, let me quote George Costanza here. If it's not a lie, like they say, it's not a lie. If you believe it, it is not bragging if it's true. Okay? It is really okay to say who you are at the bio. Don't be shy, you want to stand out, okay? It's really okay. So getting practical, how do we start writing the CFP and what do we do exactly? So a few recommendations. Please use a Google doc or a blank document. Don't use the conference form because you will lose all the things that you wrote.

Use it a Google document. And it's also very, very convenient both for using it later on and for sending it to someone to get their comments, to get their review and to hear what they have to say. Please, I don't know who here isn't a native English speaker or not, but even if you are a native English speaker, it's really okay to use AI or some sort of a grammar review. Please don't submit it before you do this, this step. It's really important. And the last thing is, and I don't know who here knows it or doesn't know it, but I recommend using a title case for the title. So that's the difference between using a title case is low, how to write perceive. So all these words are catalyse and these are not, there's a catalogue of my title tool that can help you do that versus not using the title case.

So it's not must have, but it does make you look a little bit more professional. If you use a title case regarding ai, it's really, really, really okay. And it's great to use ai, but you have to do it wisely. You can use it for brainstorming titles, you can do it for structure review, but watch out from what I call the Zoolander effect. And Zoolander effect is when too much AI uses all these words like revolutionising, demystifying, unleashing, Dell ai, really, really like de redefining to changing the way, innovating disruption or all these emojis. Okay? People can see you right through it. Okay? We know you used AI to add all of these words, okay? So it's okay to use ai, but be careful with that because if it is to ai, it will probably get developers rolling their eyes out. Then the content is too promotional when it's too commercialised.

Okay? So AI is good, but usually with care, where do you find open CCPs? Where do you find open call for papers? So we have those. We have a special page on women on stage where we regularly add new conferences. There's cons, text, sessionize, paper, call io, CCP. There are many resources for that and we have open C open CCPs all the time. So you have to track those and it's important to track the guidelines of the conference. They usually have a paragraph saying, what are we looking for? Read that. It'll help you write a better submission. And it also helps if this particular conference is something that you're really interested in. Then it also helps to browse past year sessions and to see what they're usually into. And even if your session is quite similar to something that they had two years ago, that doesn't mean that you won't get accepted.

Perhaps it even means that they will like you better. Okay? Perhaps it even means that you have a bigger chance. One last thing is that it's really, really, really okay to recycle and use the SAN fee and submit it to multiple conferences. Okay? It's really okay and you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. You want to try and see where you will get accepted and then you will get to go there. And sometimes you can even do the same talk at different conferences because it's the different audience and they don't always mind if you use something that you already done before. Okay? So we've talked about how to spark your creative mind. We talked about how to write a compelling CFE that will help you get accepted and now is the time to craft your own. So I want you to, okay, so all of you have a piece of paper and a pen or your lab groups or your phones, you could use all of those.

That's okay. And I want you to take five minutes now and try coming up with a few ideas for a title for a talk that you'll be presenting somewhere. Okay? If you don't have an idea or if you don't know what you want to talk about, you may choose the last project that you did or the last thing that you were working on just for the sake of the exercise. So take five minutes and try coming up with a few ideas and later we will review them together. You will wait for the next page. Okay?

Speaker 2: Alright.

Moran: Okay. So now I want you to sit with the person sitting next to you, sit next to you and you are each going to share the title that you wrote and then ask the other person without providing any more context. Okay? Just saying its title itself and try to answer these questions. Number one, is it clear? What do you think it's about? Once again, without providing any more context. Number two, did it grab your attention? Was it intriguing enough? Interesting. Are you curious to learn more? And the last part is do ai, do you think it was written only with AI or does it sound authentic? Okay, so you each have three minutes. So this is six minutes. So each of you have,

Speaker 3: Jacqueline, what's your title? I was wondering if your title No. Okay, makes sense. It's clear this is started. This is, it's pretty, I would say in terms of tension is probably slightly it. Yeah, usually that would be okay for it. So all of making that. Yeah, sister, all I that's outside. So

Speaker 4: Yeah,

Speaker 3: Very different deck. Okay. Staff with safety.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Oh,

Moran: I love seeing the fashion here. It looks really cool. Really happy to say that. So cute. So does anyone want to share their title?

Speaker 5: Any brave?

Moran: Yeah,

Speaker 3: Dude. Where? One he Hello?

Speaker 5: That's cool. Yes. Hello. S Okay, that's cool. That's, that's a great title. Anyone else?

Speaker 2: Yeah,

Speaker 5: Rabbit Strategies As Hold By the Wind. Turtles Actually Hear you. Sorry. Met Strategies as whole, violent, neutral. Cool. Very, very, very cool. Anyone

Moran: Else?

You're all very creative here and I saw from the discussion that you really, it seems like a lot of fun so I'm really happy to be in the end. Okay, so we're almost done, but before we go, I really want to say thank you and to give a little shout outs to all of these incredible ladies and one of them is sitting right there and say thank you for inspiring me throughout the years to come up with this content. And they're all part of my team and they're really, really, really great and I hope this memorable, actionable steps will really help you take your brilliant idea out of your head and into the stage. And I would love to stay in touch. You're all welcome to connect with me on theatre, on LinkedIn and follow me on Twitter. And please, please keep me posted and tell me about your success stories. I want to know if DS helped you and if you get accepted into some conference out there. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 5: Do we have time for questions? Yes, absolutely. Okay, so the questions, yeah,

Speaker 4: What would you say are the biggest don'ts or abstracts or,

Moran: Okay, so the biggest don't, I think it's two ai. Okay. When it's like two

Speaker 4: Buzzworthy.

Speaker 5: Yeah, too buzzworthy, too superlatives

Moran: Doesn't sound real. And another big Don is when you are trying to sell something too bluntly when you're trying to, this is the best thing ever. You have to have it. You can't be two blocks, okay? You want them to think that they must have it, but you can really see it. Developers are very, very cynical audience. You have to give them value in order to get their interest in what you're doing. I think those are the biggest no-nos. And also being too short and assuming that they understand all your buzzwords and that they understand all the things that you're talking about without providing, without really giving enough context or in describing what you really want to talk about in the extract. Okay, either title, you don't

Speaker 5: Have to put it all out there. Any more questions?

Moran: No.

Speaker 5: Okay. Oh, and I just sure. Think cloud better burning stro. So times Berry many. If you have a wall version pie show down. How do you decide that was it?

Moran: That's a good question because sometimes I have a trouble that sometimes my abstracts are too long and then I like them long because I feel like I'm really giving a story there. But people often don't have enough brain capacity to read everything. But if I ask AI to shorten it up that it really sounds awful. I think it sounds sorry,

Speaker 4: Are they trying it

Moran: Kind of dry or that I missed my unique voice when I asked AI to shorten it up. So you really have to do it yourself. You can have a few different lengths, but if you do use AI to make it shorter, you have to validate that the essence is still there and that your unique voice and the value that you want to provide in your talk really stays and it's hard to do. So sometimes it's really, really hard to take something. By the way, that's also the case for the tech doc itself. Sometimes we have a 40 minute talk and then we need to vent the lightning talk and do it like five minutes and it's really, really hard to short it up rather than make it longer. But that's a skill and you really have to identify the most important parts and the most important thing that, the most important science that you want to provide to

Speaker 5: That. Anyone else?

Speaker 4: She was a very good book back in the day. It's called Seven Databases in several weeks.

Speaker 5: Which one?

Speaker 4: Seven Databases in several weeks where have the person or different databases kind of like we can spend week learning public basically. This is another example of good as content that can have about this BM more are motivated versus react native. It's another approach to people, this type approach where you can cover different aspects and it may compare clicks. So sell or X things in X, it also needs perspective that two sound news to and now you've kind join this knowledge of your Aries that you spent into this what talk. So this is like another idea. Okay,

Moran: Thank you. Anyone else? No. Alright. So thank you very much.