Underscore are very proud to be assisting with the organisation of this year’s Scala Exchange, and as part of this we are announcing a new support program for new speakers and attendees.
There tend to be a lot of the same faces at Scala conferences. They are a great group of people, and we’re always happy to hang out with them and learn from them.
However, we also want to add new voices to the mix. We want to encourage people we haven’t heard from before, and particularly people who have never attended or spoken at a Scala conference to come to Scala Exchange. Hence we are announcing a set of support services for people who haven’t attended or spoken at a Scala conference before.
For New Speakers
Shepherding for Talk Proposals
A lot of people don’t submit talk abstracts to conferences because they can’t think of something to say or don’t think their ideas are interesting.
We are providing an optional service for all submissions to ScalaX, offering advice and feedback to help you turn an idea into a compelling conference abstract to submit along-side all the other abstracts from potential speakers.
Asking us for help won’t guarantee you a slot in the programme, but it will give you an idea for a talk that would compete against the other submissions.
If you have a good talk idea but for some reason it doesn’t make it into the conference, we will help you find another conference or meetup group for your first public speaking experience.
Speaker Training
A lot of people are concerned or nervous about speaking in public. We are offering free public speaking workshops for any new speaker who submits an abstract to the conference, whether your abstract is accepted or not.
We will be providing face-to-face workshops for people in the London area and Google Hangouts for people elsewhere.
There are a limited number of spaces available on these Hangouts, but we hope to be able to support everyone we can.
Help with Presentation Writing
If your abstract is accepted to the conference, we are offering free mentoring services to provide advice and feedback as you turn your abstract into a talk.
For Everyone
We have a small number of travel and ticket bursaries available to anyone who can demonstrate need. We can’t guarantee to be able to fund everyone. If we can’t, the bursaries will be awarded first to new speakers whose abstracts were selected by the conference committee, and then to attendees.
Want In?
If you'd like to take advantage of any of these services please fill this Google form.
If you'd like to take advantage of any of these services please fill out the Google form below (full-screen version available here):
Disclaimer: We want to provide these services to as many people as possible, so we aren't worried if you've spoken before and still want to take advantage of our speaker training, for instance. However, this is the first time we've run this program and we don't know how much demand there will be. If we find ourselves overwhelmed we may have to prioritise access.