Welcome to another edition of our great spring conference! As is the case with many of our initiatives, a large portion of our content comes from members of the community we serve—after all, if you can speak on a subject that is important to you, chances are that others who share you interests will want to hear about it!

This page outlines our call for papers process, what topics we would like to see discussed at this year’s conference and how the talks are structured. Don’t forget to check out speaker’s compensation page, too, to find out what you can expect in that department.

What Topics Are we Interested in?

We want TEK·X to be about what is useful to PHP developers.

Of course, that’s a tall order (and a tad generic), so allow us to go into a bit of detail. Attendees come to our conferences from all over the world with one goal: learn. What they learn depends largely on what they want to achieve and, while each person comes with a different set of personal experiences and expectations, what they normally want to take away from a conference is (1) how they can do their jobs better, and (2) how they can keep their expertise relevant.

The first goal is relatively easy to cater to: despite the differences in our jobs, we often face common challenges—and we want to make sure that we are as well equipped to meet them as possible. Finding topics that satisfy this type of need can be as easy as looking around yourself and find those tools, techniques or other bits of knowledge that help you do your job better.

Coming up with ideas that satisfy the second goal can be much more challenging: this is where we want to give our attendees a glimpse into the future and show them what their job might be like in a few months. New products, programming aids and technologies all fit in this category—particularly if you happen to be working on one yourself.

The most important suggestion that we can give you is to think outside the box. TEK·X attendees want to be wowed by great presentations and expect that they will get their money’s worth by making discoveries that they wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. Therefore, in addition to those topics that can help us doing what we do now in a better way, we always look for proposals that challenge our preconception of what PHP is like—and that look outside the comfort zone of most PHP developers. For example:

• Advanced programming techniques
• Software management / technical business topics
• Technical content on application frameworks (Drupal/WordPress, etc.)
• Technologies that are tangential to PHP: AJAX, jQuery, RIAs, databases, etc.

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

Talk Types

As always, the TEK·X schedule has room for two types of presentations:

• Tutorials are three-hour-long and are only presented during the tutorial day (May 18th, 2010). Two tutorials can be combined into a full-day tutorial, but we try to shy away from that in order to give our attendees as much variety as possible. Tutorials are usually reserved for more experienced presenters—it takes considerable skills to hold a crowd captive for that long (without posting guards at the doors, at least).
• Regular Talks are one hour long and are presented during the main conference days (May 19th–21st, 2010).

Both tutorials and regular talks are normally presented in the same rooms (although, of course, in different days). Traditionally, we have three concurrent sessions and we try to schedule presenters so that attendance at all the sessions that occur at the same time is as evenly distributed as possible (though we occasionally fail at this, we learned our lesson the hard way—the term “rasmussed” originated at one of our events).

There is no set format for any of the presentations (except for the time limit); you are free to organize your talk to play to your strengths—we are equally open to lectures, interactive tutorials, and whatever else you may think of; if you convince us that our attendees will be interested in your idea, so will we.

Equipment

Normally, we make the following equipment available to our speakers:

• Room (hey, you never know)
• 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.
• Fresh water
• Wireless microphone (only if the room you are presenting in is large enough to warrant)

You may have noticed that Internet access is not listed among these items. That’s because you should not, under any circumstance, write a presentation that depends on the Internet being accessible. Access at conference venues poses a number of significant challenges, and counting on its availability is a recipe for disaster. Just don’t do it.

Submitting a Proposal (or Two)

The call for papers is now closed. If you wish to contact the selection committee, you can do so by e-mail.

What Happens if You’re Not Selected?

The proposal submission process for our conferences can be highly competitive—it’s not unusual for us to receive ten or more times as many proposals as we have slots for. Therefore, it’s also not unusual that we have to reject talks that we like simply because there isn’t enough space and there are some that we think are more appropriate for our crowd.

This doesn’t mean, however, that all is lost—like in previous years, TEK·X will feature a great unconference as well. Presentation at the unconference is decided primarily by the attendees themselves during TEK·X using a process in which the organizers take a very hands-off approach. Therefore, even if your talks are not accepted, you will still have an opportunity to present them—and, although participation in the uncon is unpaid and requires the purchase of a regular conference ticket, it’s also a great way to capture the attention of the organizers and improve your chances of being selected next year.