North American TYPO3 Conference :: Call for Speakers

By: Patrick Gaumond

Never forget that our moto is Inspiring People to Share and hurry over to t3con10-dallas.typo3.org to register as a speaker or at least, attend our second North American TYPO3 Conference !

This is the time of the year where you should start thinking about what you want to share with the TYPO3 community... Never forget that our moto is Inspiring People to Share and hurry over to t3con10-dallas.typo3.org to register as a speaker for the T3CON10-Dallas Conference!

I will personally submit a talk under this title:

Growing TYPO3 in North America: Lessons learned from TYPO3's history in Québec.

The talk will consist of stories from the trenches, tips and tricks and lessons learned.

Even if you do not wish to be a speaker, I deeply encourage you to at least attend T3CON10-Dallas in May to get most of what TYPO3 can offer to you! Never underestimate the importance of meeting people and expanding your TYPO3 network. Plus think of all you will learn.

If you need some help to find good justification for your company to pay for the trip, i've found this article quite interesting:

How to justify going to conferences

These days its harder for folks to justify attending conferences. I have a few suggestions that might help towards making the case to go.

• You are an asset to your company. All assets require maintenance and enhancements. If instead of being a person, you were a piece of machinery, part of the corporate budget would go towards maintaining and upgrading you. Well, despite being human, you are an asset to the company. They should be investing the same percentage of budget towards maintaining and upgrading your skills as they do for the rest of the corporate assets.

• Offer to train others in what you learned when you return. You can pitch your trip to a conference as a way to bring back skills and knowledge to the rest of the organization. If you have any experience in training or teaching, you can use that as your justification to attend instead of other co-workers. Get extra copies of the tutorial notes from other sessions. This is often a cheap way to get some extra coverage.

• Trip report. Arguably one form of teaching others, the trip report is a write up of the sessions you attended, written for other folks in your group. The best trip reports make it easy for folks to dig up the right reference, or trigger people to come ask you questions. There’s rarely much value in 10 page trip report documents: no one reads them. Instead, a 2 or 3 page summary, with URLs and pointers to stuff for specific questions gets much more mileage.

• Connect the value of the conference to business goals. If ease of use or customer satisfaction are company or division goals, you can claim that sending folks to conferences on those subjects will help pull in more expertise and knowledge towards helping the business. This argument puts less of the focus on your professional goals, and more on the company.

• Recruiting. One of the reasons to send people to conferences is to recruit for open positions. If your team has had trouble filling certain jobs, or know that new openings are coming for your group, you can offer to do recruiting work while you’re there. Most conferences have job posting boards, or allow you to rent a booth for your company at the trade show.

• Professional development. If you have career discussions with you manager, tie your career goals and future development to specific kinds of training or growth opportunities that you need. This might force you to rethink which conferences you’re going to (the cool conference might not be the one that’s likely to help your career/skill growth the most). In some organizations, folks will get to go to conferences provided they are presenting or participating in a session. If you don’t know what your group’s policy is, ask.

• Split the costs. If you believe the conference is needed for your professional development, then you should want to attend regardless of who pays. Offer to split the costs. Or ask just for the time off without having to use up vacation time, and you pay your own way. This can be a way to prove the value of the conference, if you return with great stuff and teach others on your team. But it can also set a precedent for you paying your own way. You might position it as a trial: if you can show that it’s valuable, your manager will pay next time.

Author: Scott Berkun

http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/24-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-conferences/

Hope to see you there in May and share knowledge with you !

Patrick