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Timeline

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Program Timeline

6-8 Months Prior

  • Plan the Call for Proposals. Draft the text, review it with other team members
  • Make list of groups and people to contact to encourage them to submit
  • Decide on deadlines and coordinate those with Opportunity Grants
  • Decide on number of tracks and talks
  • Decide on review criteria

5-6 Months Prior

  • Open CFP
  • Publicize CFP
  • Recruit people to submit talks
  • Recruit reviewers

4-5 Months Prior

  • Share reviewer guidelines with reviewers
  • Review talks
  • Select final talks
  • Send out acceptances
  • Send out rejections (stagger acceptances and rejections; some people will be accepted and not be able to present after all, so may be able to accept someone off the unofficial "waitlist")
  • Create the schedule
  • Share schedule with speakers first to deal with any time conflicts

3-4 Months Prior

  • Publish schedule
  • Make sure to send speaker ticket codes/links

1 Month Prior

  • Communicate slide guidelines and other speaker information to presenters
  • Contact tutorial leaders to prompt them to come up with installation instructions for their attendees

1 Week Prior

  • Communicate slide guidelines, quiet room, green room, session emcee/runner information to presenters
  • Make sure speakers know when/where to meet their session emcee or runner
  • Make sure speaker knows their presentation length and that it includes time for questions
  • Give tutorial presenters a list of their attendees so they can manage communication with them

At the conference

  • Ensure bottled water is at the podium (the venue may be doing this)
  • Ensure extra adapters and dongles are available to debug speaker laptop issues (A/V team will have plenty)
  • Ensure each session has an emcee and runner (if using)

Example deadlines

These deadlines were from 2026, where the conference was held August 24-28. You can use these as a guideline for future conferences by adjusting forward/backward by the relevant number of weeks.

  • March 16 (Mon) - CFP and Opportunity Grants close; notify talk reviewers who have messaged us about wanting to do reviews that they can start to review
  • April 10 (Fri) - talk reviews done by this date
  • April 13 week - thunderdome
  • April 20 week - review speakers with CoC teams in DSF and PSF
  • April 27 week - first round of acceptance emails to speakers
  • May 15 (Fri) - decision notifications sent out by no later than this date
  • May 20 (Wed) - talk and tutorial speaker deadline to let us know if they accept our acceptance
  • May 29 (Fri) - waitlisted talks deadline to let us know they accept waitlist
  • May 29 (Fri) - export from pretalx to github schedule - but do not publish yet
  • June 1 (Mon) - email proposed talk time to speakers
  • June 8 (Mon) - deadline for talk speakers let us know if time slot is ok
  • June 8 (Mon) - notification date (stay quiet on socials until this has passed)
  • June 15 (Mon) - publish the schedule as a blog post
  • June 19 (Fri) - let waitlisted know if their talk was swapped into schedule or not
  • July 24 (Fri) - hotel reservations by attendees must be received on or before this date
  • July 27 (Mon) - redeem speaker ticket by this date
  • Aug 24 (Mon) - first day of talks