Tips for submitting a talk to HOPE

Confirmed talks (so far):

View the current list of confirmed talks.  Yours could be among them: talks are still being accepted.

Tips for submitting

If you're looking to submit a talk, please check out the following:

Often times, the talk description you submit gets used in the HOPE program. This means conference attendees will be reading it. If you can, include a catchy descriptive title. Make sure your abstract will help attendees to decide whether to come listen to your talk. If you don't feel like you can come up with a clever title or explain how this relates to a larger audience, it's not the end of the world (we can help), but again: it is a huge help if you can envision who might be interested in this talk, and explain to them what they will be hearing that's not covered elsewhere.

Detail really helps. You don't have to give us your full outline, but try to say more than "this will cover the threat of X." Try to address the following:

• Why is this topic important or interesting? How does it have an impact that a broad audience might understand?
• What is new about this *talk*, particularly if you've given a talk on a similar subject before? (There's been a lot of pushback about talks which have been given elsewhere and don't seem to address anything new.)
• Tell us what you're going to tell our audience. If your abstract is more questions than answers, we want to know what answers you plan to discuss during the talk. If there's material you don't want to publish in the program, we can work with you on that front, but in order to approve your talk we need to have at least some idea of what you're going to say.

If you plan to cover a particularly broad topic in your talk, we need you to be particularly specific in your proposal. Again, we need to have  an idea of what you're going to say, and "I'm going to talk about the intersection of computer security and political discourse" just doesn't cut it.

Watch out for acronyms and jargon in your proposal. The speaker committee has a broad and diverse range of expertise. We may not be from your field, and we may not know what a particular term means, so you may want to spell it out for us and for the audience.

We are happy to entertain a few talk ideas if you don't feel like you know which one would be best for HOPE, but again, we need DETAIL. We can't do much with a one-line idea or "what would you like to hear from me?"

Finally, if you have previously submitted the same proposal elsewhere, please consider how it looks if you submit something to us that says "This talk is perfect for DEFCON/Shmoocon/Foo Camp/etc because..." Kinda makes us feel like chopped liver, y'know? It's a minor change to make. Do us the favor.