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Speaker Chair

The Speaker Chair leads the Speaker Committee: the CFP, talk selection, keynotes, tutorials, the schedule, and all speaker communications.

Responsibilities

Pre-Event

  • Open the keynote nomination form (Google Form) at kickoff and close it end of September.
  • Run the keynote organizer election in early October: ranked ballot, +2 to -2 scoring, then a decided invite order. Work down the list and keep the backup order intact; invitations often go several names deep before someone accepts.
  • Open the CFP on Pretalx October 1, the cycle's first hard deadline, and close it early December.
  • Ask in the CFP whether selected speakers will need travel assistance; the answers feed opportunity grant planning.
  • Recruit tutorial presenters by direct invitation, starting with PyCon hallway conversations about 11 months out. Tutorials are not part of the open CFP.
  • Run talk review over the holidays, at least 2 full weeks: voting in Pretalx, then an in-person decision meeting.
  • Notify speakers around the new year with a hard confirmation deadline of about 2 weeks. Hold an ordered waitlist with the top candidates flagged, reject everything below the waitlist promptly, and offer standby speakers free tickets.
  • Send the speaker information form at acceptance and collect name, socials, and photo then; most speakers do not respond to later requests, and marketing stalls waiting on them.
  • Publish the schedule with slack for late dropouts; expect at least one within the final few weeks. Present the schedule to the planning meeting about 7.5 weeks out.
  • Get Slido and StageTimer single-event quotes about 7.5 weeks out.
  • Treat remote talks as high-risk and rehearse the audio path end to end; a remote talk with broken audio is the program failure attendees remember most.
  • Send the speaker KBYG about 2 weeks out, open the slide-upload folder, and collect technical-term lists for caption prep.
  • Build per-day lightning talk signup forms in the final week.

Day of Event

  • Brief speakers in person at the Friday appreciation dinner; speakers do not read email.
  • Run speaker tech checks Friday before 9:00 or at lunch; catch-as-catch-can between stage events on the weekend.
  • Keep the program on time with StageTimer and run Q&A through Slido. Never let the schedule run early; have filler trivia ready.
  • Seat the on-deck speaker when the prior talk begins; each 30-minute block is a 25-minute talk plus 5 minutes of Q&A and changeover.
  • Curate lightning talks: 8-9 slots per day, and submissions exceed slots.

Post Event

  • Distribute per-speaker feedback compiled from Slido and the feedback form.
  • Feed speaker-experience lessons into the retro.

Relevant Runbooks

Past Program Chairs

The role was named Program Chair through the 2025 cycle.

Year Name
2022 Mason Egger
2023 Brad Brown
2024 Brad Brown & Josh Schneider
2025 Brad Brown & Josh Schneider