Speaker guidelines

We are as excited as you are for your session at PyCon India. We want to ensure you make most out of this opportunity to present in front of a diverse audience at the conference. This document will walk you through the conference guidelines and best practices to ensure the effectiveness of your session.

Guidelines

Following are the guidelines each speaker must follow. These are there to ensure the event is neutral and more in the spirit of open source.

  1. Each slide must not have a logo or equivalent that represents a company/organization.

    You may have a company logo where you introduce yourself, but speaker details should be more prominent.

  2. No product or hiring pitches are to be done during the session.

  3. If any external images or resources are used, credits or links to the source must be mentioned on the slide or at the end.

  4. If your session is about a commercial/non-open source product, a major part of your session must be about the technical implementation details of it.

    This is to ensure that your session doesn’t become a product marketing session and that attendees benefit from your learning.

  5. Your talk and slides must follow the PyCon India Code of Conduct.

Note that some of these might not apply to the sponsored sessions.

Best practices

Here are some of the best practices that would help you make your sessions better.

  1. Have an introduction slide where you talk about yourself.

    This helps the attendees get to know you, why you are talking about the topic, and also helps them answer “Why should they listen to you?”.

  2. Add interactive elements to your talk, this can be as simple as asking a show of hands or a quick quiz.

  3. Keep your demos recorded. This can save you at times when things just break, you don’t have Internet connection and so on.

  4. A must-read: Accessible Speaking Best Practices this also has actionable steps.

    1. Ensure the font size is large enough so that it is visible to the attendees from the back.

    2. Consider using a light theme for slides, as the contrast and visibility of the light themes is more in general.

    3. If you are showing code live, close all sidebars, extra tabs etc. to make it distraction free.