One of the challenges I’ve seen with a few events in 2022 is finding a precon speaker for an event. All the data from PASS was lost, and many of the schedules for past events don’t contain who delivered a precon. Even for past Summit conferences, the list of precon speakers is somewhat lost.
In trying to help organizers find someone to present an all day (or half day) class, I often rack my brain or run random Google searches. A very inexact, time intensive, and annoying process.
I’ve been thinking about how to make this a better process for organizers and speakers. How can we connect people together better. I think Daniel Hutmacher has done a great job with callfordataspeakers.com, but using that service requires someone to post an event and others to respond. It’s a pull service for speakers, not a push one.
Working with smaller, free events, time is precious. Energy is as well. While we would hope announcing a new SQL Saturday would bring speakers coming to offer precon sessions, it doesn’t always happen. People also drop out and organizers sometimes need to reach out to potential precon candidates.
My Proposal
What I’d like to do is have a list of pre-con speakers available that organizers can look at. I’d also like to not maintain it, but that’s easy. We can use the same mechanisms we use now with GitHub to allow others to submit their name as a Pull Request (PR).
What I’m thinking is to use a Precon Speaker Page at sqlsaturday.com, where we ask for this information from speakers:
- Speaker Name
- Contact URL
- Topics
- Locations they are willing to present a session
Simple, easy, and something that speakers can add themselves to as a PR, or send a note to admin@sqlsaturday.com with the details.
I’m hoping this is one thing that might make it easier for organizers to run better events, have more options, encourage diversity, and spend less time organizing their event and more time enjoying life.
Steve Jones
Remind others to register here: http://eepurl.com/hwVBKn