For those who couldn’t make today’s presentation, or those who could but want to hear Tim Ford and Buck Woody trashing Wisconsin, I’m pleased to share with you both the slides and the recording of today’s presentation. Or rather, two recordings.
Submitting a session to the PASS Summit really isn’t terrifying. What’s terrifying is being accepted and being faced with the prospect of speaking… I kid, I kid. There’s nothing terrifying about it. You put together an abstract, revise it a few times, and then submit it. When you submit an abstract you’ll want to put together a list of objectives – problems that you’re going to solve for the attendees.
Well, that’s about all there is to that. If you have questions, post them in the comments. I can’t tell you what PASS is looking for because, well, I don’t know. It’s based on a number of different things and depends, in part, on your abstract itself. So, write some abstracts, give them a once over, and submit them to PASS.
Want some more ideas about writing abstracts? Look no further than Brent Ozar’s blog post How to Get Readers to Pay Attention.
Want to know more about public speaking? I would suggest Confessions of a Public Speaker
Comments
Any chance of saving the PPT’s in Office 2003 format for those of us that can’t afford the upgrade to 2007? Thanks.
I’ll get that uploaded sometime later on today.
In the meantime, one way to afford the upgrade to 2007 is to use the free compatibility pack.
Thanks for putting this together. I’m working on my abstracts for PASS right now, and the advice is making me go through each one to ensure I’ve taken to heart the advice in the presentations. Even if I don’t get accepted my abstracts in the future will be better from listening to this.
One other thing that just bit me, I got so excited about submitting sessions I missed the single line that stated “only last 4 will be considered” and submitted about a dozen. This is something that you guys should mention the next time you do the seminar/webcast, to submit the best four. It would also be nice if the website enforced the limit four rule if you’re going to have it, and give people a way to go delete sessions they’ve already submitted in case they come up with a better one prior to the closing of call for speakers.
I fully admit I should have caught the limit of four, but even so having the ability to delete submitted sessions seems like an obvious need for the website. Not just in this case but for when someone submits then can’t make it, (assuming they know prior to call for speaker closing) they can remove their sessions and save the organizers some headaches.
I agree, being able to enforce the limitation would be very nice. Unfortunately, we’re constrained by the software vendor we’re currently using. We are actively looking into how to solve this problem going forward but with the third party vendor we do have some limitations around how things are presented and limiting the software.
There are some things that have to be manual, unfortunately, because only so much software can be developed with a finite amount of money
However, you’ve got some good suggestions that I’ll record and pass along for the next round of submissions.
Thanks Jeremiah, coming from a developer background myself I do understand the constraints of time and budget. Also have to give a big thanks to @sqlinsaneo, he helped me out so my best four are now the submitted ones. You PASS leadership volunteers are great, looking forward to the Summit regardless of whether I’m selected or not.