The Call for Papers is now closed. We’re working hard at sorting through the many (many!) proposals we’ve received and will announce a schedule as soon as possible.

Welcome to the 2012 Call for Papers! This document gives you a brief (or, at least, as brief as we can make it) explanation of what we’re looking for and of how the selection process works. In addition, you need to review the Speaker’s Package for this year.

What we look for

2012 will undoubtedly be a year of change and transformation in our industry, which means that we need to be ready for a wide range of new technologies both on the client and server side.

• HTML5
• node.js
• Continuous Integration
• APIs
• …and other things that will impact PHP developers this year

Thus, the simple answer is to the question “What topics are you looking for?” is: anything that helps inspire PHP developers to do their jobs better, more easily, and more efficiently.

Remember that most talk slots are 50 minutes long; therefore, you should aim to inspire more than to educate. Ideally, attendees should leave your talk with more questions than they come in, and with the tools to go find the answers they’re looking for.

Most importantly, we do not necessarily look for talks that are about PHP. Some of the most successful presentations over the years have been on products built on PHP (like frameworks) and on technologies that are tangential to it (e.g.: Apache, JavaScript, databases, and so on).

This is as much information that we are going to give you on this page about what topics we want to see covered—the rest is up to you specifically because the conference is going to be made up of people like you.

Who we look for

You don’t have to be a professional speaker to present at Tek. In fact, many of the most memorable talks we have seen over the years have come from people who never spoke publicly before.

When we decide whether to accept a talk, we look primarily at whether we think that the topic is relevant to our audience, whether you know what you’re talking about, and whether you want to make sure that the main goal of the presentation is to inspire and captivate your audience, rather than showing them how knowledgeable you are.

Talk types

Tek has two types of talks:

• Tutorials take place on Tuesday (May 22) and are either three or six hours long. This is the only portion of the conference where the attendees expect in-depth coverage of a specific topic. Because of the length and complexity of tutorials, we tend to be a little more conservative in accepting speakers for them.
• Regular talks take place on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and are fifty minutes long, including Q&A.

Equipment

All our rooms come with the following:

• Lectern
• SVGA projector (1024×768) with RGB input. If your laptop only has DVI or one of the Apple connectors (take your pick), please ensure that you bring your own adaptor. We usually have a few on hand, but there are so many variations that we cannot guarantee we have the one that works for you.
• Drinking water

What happens if you’re selected?

If we choose your talk, we’ll let you know ahead of the official announcement (usually during the first half of January).

Later in the year, we’ll be in touch to help you arrange your travel. We provide a travel allowance for airplane/car/train/horse/magic carpet and hotel stay to all speakers.

What happens if you’re not selected?

We typically get ten or more proposal for each slot that we have available, which makes the selection process highly competitive. We also, however, have a policy of ensuring that a number of our talks are from new speakers, or at least on new topics, so don’t let the competition discourage you.

If your talk does end up not making the cut, not all hope is lost. First of all, we always extend our Charter Ticket pricing to those who submit proposals until the end of January. This way, you can still attend Tek and take advantage of our lowest ticket prices. And, if you make it, we always host an extremely popular and very well attended Uncon, which is perfect for you to test drive your talk and present it anyway.