As promised in the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, all of the talk selection decisions were emailed out on April 17th. Our talk selection work has now concluded, with the possible exception of accepting proposals from the Reserve list.
So what’s next? First I want to thank all of you Postgres people who submitted such amazing talk proposals into the CFP for POSETTE, now in its 3rd year. I was so impressed by the submissions and wish we could have accepted more of them.
And I also want to thank Alicja Kucharczyk, Daniel Gustafsson, and Melanie Plageman from POSETTE’s Talk Selection Team for contributing their time and expertise to collaborate with me to select the talks for this year’s virtual POSETTE event. It’s not easy to carefully read through and review 184 talk proposals—in just 8 days—to come up with the program for an event like #PosetteConf.
That’s right, 184 talk proposals—from 120 unique speakers. (The CFP had a maximum of 4 submissions per speaker.) With just 38 talks to accept this year, that means POSETTE 2024 has a ~20% talk acceptance rate. Bottom line, we had some difficult decisions to make.
The original POSETTE plan for 2024 was to have 4 livestreams with 9 talks each. The math looked like this:
However, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that, we had to throw that math out the window. There were too many good talk proposals.
Luckily the talk production team led by Teresa Giacomini was able to rejigger their recording schedules to make room for 6 more talks.
So the final POSETTE 2024 schedule will have:
And yes, we’ve already started discussions to figure out how we could support more talks in the schedule next year, for POSETTE 2025.
Below is a chart of the CFP submissions by Day, so those of you who are deadline driven (I’m guilty as charged too) will see you’re not alone. In fact, more than 50% of the talk proposals were submitted in the last week of the CFP.
Side-note: When a talk proposal was submitted had zero bearing on the talk selection process. We didn’t start reviewing and voting until after the CFP was closed and all proposals were in the system.
Transparency into the process used for talk selection can be helpful for Postgres conference speakers which is why I’m writing this post. And in particular, it helps to remind yourself that many of the Postgres conference CFPs are competitive. So if your talk proposal was one of the submissions that was declined (or placed on the reserve list) for this year’s POSETTE, please remember:
Speaking of which, there are probably some Postgres CFPs that are open right now! One big one that comes to mind is PGConf NYC 2024, happening in midtown Manhattan from Sep 30th to Oct 2nd 2024. The PGConf NYC 2024 CFP will be open until Jun 5th 2024.
Our talk selection team used a 2-phase process for doing talk selection.
Holistic considerations are when we look at the “whole” of the schedule, and the desire to have a balanced and diverse set of topics, teaching styles, and speakers.
For example, we knew we wanted speakers from around the globe and didn’t want to accidentally end up with speakers from just one corner of the world.
And we knew we didn’t want 50% of the talks to be about AI in Postgres. But clearly AI is a hot topic, which is why there will be a handful of super-interesting talks about the role of AI in the Postgres ecosystem.
And we knew we wanted at least a few Postgres talks that were Django-focused or Rails-focused.
We also knew there is an expectation that Postgres experts who work at Microsoft will share their expertise at this event, particularly as it relates to the Azure managed services for PostgreSQL.
However, we also wanted to make space for Postgres users and open source community members outside of Microsoft too. After all, Postgres is a global community that spans countries, companies, and timezones! The final schedule is not yet published, but I predict that over 65% (or even 70%) of the sessions will have speakers from outside of Microsoft.
Thank you again to everyone who submitted proposals into the CFP for POSETTE.
And big welcome to those of you whose talks are accepted to POSETTE. And to those of you whose talk proposals are on the Reserve list, we’ll reach out to you right away if a spot opens up in POSETTE for your proposal.
As for the schedule, it gets announced on May 1st 2024. That’s when you’ll be able to see all the talks in each of the 4 livestreams for this year’s POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, happening virtually on Jun 11-13.
We hope you will be as excited about these speakers and these Postgres talks as we are.
In the meantime if you want to proactively mark your calendar for the livestreams which are most convenient for your schedule, here you go:
You can also subscribe to POSETTE news if you want email notifications as things happen, such as when the schedule is announced or when the videos are published, or when next year’s event is announced and the CFP opens for 2025.
And of course you can always follow @PosetteConf on Threads or on X/Twitter, or on Mastodon by following @[email protected]. The event hashtag is #PosetteConf.
Several other PostgreSQL events this year have also shared info about their CFP submissions and talk selection processes. A few recent examples:
Footnotes
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