Skip to content

Timeline

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 2024, where the conference was held the week of September 22. You can use these as a guideline for future conferences by adjusting forward/backward by the relevant number of weeks.

  • April 29 - CFP closes; notify talk reviewers who have messaged us about wanting to do reviews that they can start to review
  • May 10 - talk reviews done by this date
  • May 13 week - thunderdome
  • First week of June- notification emails to talks/tutorials
  • June 14 - decision notifications sent out by no later than this date
  • June 21 - talk and tutorial speaker deadline to let us know if they accept our acceptance
  • June 28 - waitlisted talks deadline to let us know they accept waitlist
  • June 28 - export from pretalx to github schedule - but do not publish yet
  • July 8 - talk speakers let us know if time slot is ok
  • July 8 - notification date (stay quiet on socials until this has passed)
  • July 9 - publish the schedule as a blog post
  • July 19 - let waitlisted know if their talk was swapped into schedule or not early August - send out Google drive link to online talks
  • August 19 - online talk recordings uploaded by this date
  • August 23 - hotel reservations by attendees must be received on or before this date
  • August 25 - redeem speaker ticket by this date
  • Sept 22 (Sun) - tutorials (in person this year)