Today I want to announce that call for speakers for DataWeekender v3.1 is now open. Which you can submit a session for here.
DataWeekender v3.1 will take place on May 15th, 2021. We suspect a lot of you will appreciate the name for this one.
Recap
Just a quick recap for you all. DataWeekender is a free online conference for the Microsoft Data Platform community.
It was the first online Microsoft Data Platform event to appear last year to make up for cancelled or postponed events around Europe.
Because we are so proud of what we achieved last year we are going do it for a third time. Which will make DataWeekender so far, a trilogy.
In reality, we may make some changes this time around. However, our core values relating to inclusiveness and diversity will remain the same.
How to attend
You can attend the conference by signing up through Meetup using the link here.
Announcements
Now, we do have a couple of big announcements about the next DataWeekender.
First, this time around we will be giving speakers for this DataWeekender something a bit extra as well as the stickers. I’m sure some of you will speculate but you will just have to wait and see
Secondly, this time around we also have added an additional session format. Which is a 60 minute session using only one slide. A challenge some of you will probably enjoy doing.
Due to how popular they were last time, we are going to host lightning talks again as well.
Session variety
Just like before, we welcome sessions relating to anything at all to do with the Microsoft Data Platform.
For example, below is a list of some of the applications and services we have had sessions about at previous DataWeekender conferences.
- Microsoft SQL Server (inc. SQL Server services in Azure)
- Microsoft Power Platform (including Power BI)
- Quantum computing
- Git
- Azure Data Lake
- Azure Data Studio
- Azure Databricks
- Azure DevOps
- Azure Kubernetes Service
- Azure Synapse Analytics
In addition to this, we also welcome diverse sessions that are related to the Microsoft Data Platform. For example, sessions relating to mental health and racial equality when visualizing data.
Tracks
As before, we are not naming tracks as part of call for speakers. Just like before we will see what happens during session selection. We don’t want to miss out on any diverse sessions just because they didn’t fit into a box.
Especially since some of our diverse sessions, like the one from Tracy Boggiano, went down so well last year.
In fact, the same goes for the number of sessions and the start and end times of the event as well. Because the sessions we select and the location of speakers we select will influence these.
Diversity
All of us in the DataWeekender organization team want to make one thing very clear. Which is that we are a global conference and embrace diversity. With this in mind, we have a statement about diversity which you can read in detail here.
In addition, as I mentioned in a previous post here we changed our Code of Conduct last year. Stating that the master-slave terminology will not be welcome at the next DataWeekender.
Basically, we want submissions from a variety of speakers in the spirit of diversity. We welcome sessions from all backgrounds and genders. In fact, we are very proud of the gender balance we had last year and hope to make it even better this year.
Badges
Even though the main logo has changed again you can still use the original event badges. With this in mind, if you are going to post about your support for us free to use the image below.
You are more than welcome to use this badge as part of your social media picture as well if you so wish.
Final word
Since we have all been asked this a lot, I’m glad the DataWeekender v3.1 call for speakers is now open. If you are going to submit for it, I wish you good luck.
Of course, if you have any questions about it please feel free to reach out to myself or any of the other organizers. You can find a list of the organizers here.
[…] Call for speakers is still open until April 10th so there is still time to submit your own session. You can view submitted sessions on the call for speakers page here. […]