Call for Speakers

**Applications are now closed**

Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal. Speakers will be notified and announced publicly soon.

WordCamp Edinburgh is happening on the 21st November 2015 and we’re looking for speakers to make this a great WordCamp. You could be one of them!

WordCamp Edinburgh is run by the WordPress community here in Edinburgh. We hold a local meetup each month and bring together bloggers, designers, developers, small business owners and entrepreneurs who are passionate about the web and WordPress.

We want this WordCamp to feature speakers from Edinburgh, Scotland, Britain and further afield. We’re serious about making this event a great venue for local and global members of the WordPress community to meet and share ideas. We’re hoping that more than half of our speakers will be from our region.

Format

We plan to have two tracks, with one focusing on content and the other on code. Each speaker will have 25-30 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions.

Finally, we plan to have one 30 minute session for lightning talks — 5 minute slots to share a tool or technique, demo a cool project or introduce an interesting idea. These will be picked on the day by attendees, who can vote for talks they want to see or propose their own on a board outside the venue. If you have an idea and what to toss your name in the hat early, let us know and we’ll get it up on the board at the start of the day.

What We Are After

We like examples. Not all talks lend themselves to this, but we’d love to hear stories about how you grew your blog, how you generate ideas, stay motivated, pull off some cool development trick, streamline your workflow, do your thing. We’re interested in the success stories — big or small — that you’ve had.

WordCamp speakers aren’t always experts. You don’t need to be the master of your domain to speak. If you’ve got an idea or an experience that you want to share, don’t hesitate to submit a talk.

We ran a small, informal survey in our local meetup to see what people wanted to hear about. What’d we find out? They want to hear about everything! Here are some of the topics we’re interested in for each track.

Content
This track is for bloggers, business owners, web agencies and freelancers who don’t write code. We’ll get a big mix of people here with all kinds of experience with WordPress. Here are some of the topics they wanted to hear about:

  • Search Engine Optimization (the eternal battle)
  • Effective writing and blogging for businesses
  • Keeping sites secure
  • Best practices for eCommerce
  • Using themes and plugins effectively
  • Project and client management (including examples from experienced agencies)

Code
This track is for developers who write code for building websites — or those who want to learn! We’ll have a good mix of beginner and advanced developers. Here are some of the topics they wanted to hear about:

  • REST API (everyone wants to hear more about this, talk to us about it!)
  • First steps with theme and plugin development
  • Theme optimization and organisation
  • Performance and caching
  • Workflows and tools (staging, testing and all the rest)
  • Accessibility
  • Security