In 2020, we had the idea over a weekend early into lockdown that it would be a great idea to organise a virtual conference for the coming Friday.
I learned two things in those 5 days:
- There are some truly amazing people in this world to drop things and help a conference go ahead with 4 days notice and present (Dan Leibson, Jamie Alberico, John Mueller).
- Never organise a conference in 5 days. It’s stupid.
With 2020 coming to a close, and three VirtuaCon virtual conferences and one Halloween series special later I’ve worked with 20+ speakers (50% of whom it was their first speaking event) from pretty much all five continents (come on Oceania!).
This is why I’d like to try something else new and ambitious, a Virtual Open Conference.
Back when we could see people, physically, I really loved going to MeasureCamp, an un-conference in which the attendees turned up, and put their names down to present a session. No prior schedule or speakers list.
I want to try and do the same, digitally.
Crawl Error 2021 will have it’s speaker line-up revealed on January 14th 2021 – and I have no idea who will be on it. I’ve reached out to a few people, including a lot of members of the TechSEO Women’s speakers list and a number of other people.
Key Dates
- November 25th 2020 – Talk submission opens
- January 12th 2020 – Talk submissions close
- January 14th 2021 – Speaker & Schedule reveal!
- January 28, 29, 30, 31 – THE CONFERENCE! (Depending on the number of submitted talks)
Who’s Eligible To Talk
If you’re interesting in submitting a talk, you need to meet the following criteria:
- You’re human.
I don’t care if it’s your first time talking, or your 1000th.
I don’t care if you’re deaf, blind, unable to speak – if you want to speak at an event with a relatively modest global audience, I’ll do my utmost to make it work. You don’t need to contact me to clear talk topics. If people submit similar talk topics to you, then that’s my problem to work everyone into a schedule.
How To Submit A Talk
Submitting a talk is easy, simply record your talk and save it to Google Drive (as a shared file), or an actual MP4 file and submit via the form below before January 12th 2020.
Please do not use this form to submit talk ideas, this is literally a talk submission method.
https://forms.yandex.ru/u/5fbd46bbf41873e78a05bb30/
If you submit a talk, it will be built into the schedule, as long as:
- It doesn’t contain any adult content or copyrighted content
- It’s not massively inappropriate
- It’s not about link building or digital PR
If you want to chat over a talk idea, drop me a DM on Twitter – but I can almost guarantee I’ll say yes. It’s a 4 day conference, there will be some duplication, there will be some crossover. It’s going to be my problem to work out a schedule, so just record away!