The Call for Speakers is your chance to be a more active part in the conference, and place your mark on the DevOps community. We encourage a wide range of original material, with a focus on new presenters.

What we are looking for:

Types of accepted proposals:

• Ignites: 5 minute, auto forwarding talk
• Session: A 30 minute talk on topic of your choice, with some time for questions.
• Workshop: A 60 to 120 minute interactive workshop where you are teaching a group how to do something.

General Guidelines:

• Be concise.
• Add as much detail as you can.
• Multiple entries are welcome.
• Attempt to not give details to who you are, we prefer to judge based on content.
• All presentations must conform to the code of conduct.
• Preferably submit via this web app, however we also will accept submissions by email: organizers@devopsdayskc.org

Ideas:

This is what we would like to know. Do you have an answer?

• The DevOps movement has been around for a few years now: Did anyone find out if it really helped your organization? Are there numbers for this?
• Did the culture of DevOps spread to other parts of your company? If not, why?
• Is DevOps the magic silver bullet which solved all your problems? What are the problems it didn’t solve (although you thought it would)?
• Were there unexpected problems during your cultural change into DevOps?
• Did the required skill-set of people change after starting to do things DevOps-Style?
• Did people leave because you “went DevOps”? Was this good or bad or both?
• Have there been technical changes after the culture in your team changed?
• Did the change affect the business/sales/marketing side?
• And of course: Has DevOps affected you personally? How do you feel about the change it brought to your work?

The “classic” DevOps questions are of course not fully answered, either…

• What is the role of QA/Tester in DevOps, how do we integrate QA in the continuous delivery process
• The impact DevOps has on traditional security/auditing/change control
• Building dashboards because #monitoringsucks
• The impact of DevOps on HR policies, and the hiring process
• Help prove that DevOps can scale beyond the 5-8 person web startups, we love traditional IT enterprise cases
• With all the automation, data is still a hard thing to handle, how does it affect DBA’s, backup strategies, …

If you’d like some more specific topic examples…

• How about release management.
• Integrating security into the DevOps conversation
• How to handle budgets for DevOps initiatives
• DevOps and Working Remotely
• Value Stream Mapping
• Having DevOps make #monitoringsucks less

Help!

Mentoring

We encourage new and seasoned speakers. If you’re interested in working with a mentor to develop an idea into a session or ignite, please reach out via organizers@devopsdayskc.org or on Slack at slack.devopskc.com. We will do our best to provide options for mentorship pairing. At the very least we’ll do our best to provide mentorship ourselves. :)

Travel Assistance

Please let us know if you need assistance with travel costs including hotel, flight, and parking. This will not affect our decision-making one way or the other, but is good to know as we finalize our budget.