TechEd ANZ Call for Content Update

We’ve had a great response to the TechEd ANZ Call For Content we announced a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the submission count as of this morning:

I’ve had a couple of questions around this and while I’ve answered them directly, I’ll also post the answers here.

When do submissions close?

The answer is "it depends". Track owners will close off their tracks for submissions when they feel like they’ve got enough submissions. Having said that, we’ll leave all tracks open until at least the 1st of June, so you’ve still got a week or so as a minimum.

What’s the difference between a Breakout Session and a Birds of a Feather Session?

A breakout session is one of the main sessions that are held during the conference. There are 9 rooms available in each of 15 time slots across the 3 days. You can expect anywhere between 20 and 1000 people at a breakout session. The content and presenters for these sessions are determined by the track owners.

Birds of a Feather sessions are designed to be informal gatherings of like-minded people. This is a community-driven session held outside the timeslots for breakouts. It's likely that there will be perhaps as many as 10 BoF sessions and they’ll be scheduled for lunchtimes and perhaps on Wednesday evening. We're planning to make the BoF selection something that attendees can contribute to. The current proposal (subject to change, no promises etc) is to publish a list of the submissions and have people vote.

How Many Submissions Will You Accept?

There are only 135 slots for TechEd this year and so there are obviously going to be many more public submissions than available slots. There's no hard number we're aiming for, but please don’t be too disappointed if your session isn't selected this time. One of the things I’d love to do though is publicise the sessions that weren't selected with a view to local User Groups picking them up as presentations through the year. I won’t do that without the submitter's permission though.

Are You Paying Presenters?

No – there's been some confusion because the link from my original post to the rules for submitting content was a generic link that triggered some "smart" stuff server-side to determine where you were submitting from and displayed the rules appropriate to that region. A number of people got the TechEd North America rules (it explicitly said that at the top of the page) and they do have a stipend for speakers. We don't have the budget for that.

So there's no more confusion, here are the rules for submitting content for TechEd Australia and New Zealand.