UI5con@SAP 2020 Call for Proposals – A Peek Behind the Curtains

UI5con@SAP is back in St. Leon-Rot, Germany, on June 19! The call for proposals has started some weeks ago already, as I hope all of you know ?. But as we have learned from the past: The last week before the deadline, which is next Monday (March 9), is always the most active phase of submission. That’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to give you some tips and perhaps fill in a few missing pieces. And if you’re still unsure whether you should submit an idea, I’d also like to motivate all of you to follow the call.

Program Jury

I am delighted that we managed again to recruit a diverse committee of UI5 enthusiasts from the UI5 community, some of whom you might already know. This year’s UI5con@SAP program jury consists of Roel van den Berge, Volker Buzek, Nicolas Goris, Greg Malewski, Daniel Rothmund, and Malte Wedel plus our steering members Stefan Beck, Andreas Kunz, and myself.

At this point, I would like to thank all external jury members for their time and commitment – and in fact, for their courage to volunteer for the job when I asked!

Speaker Profile

The call for proposals is aimed at whoever is interested in sharing ideas, experiences, or thoughts on OpenUI5, SAPUI5 or any project related to UI5. We’d like to strike a balance between speakers from the various fields: consultants, developers, architects, administrators, designers, hobby UI5 developers, SAP partners, students, SAP employees… Aspects like your employment relationship or any relationship to SAP do not matter. We strive to be a welcoming conference for first-time speakers and having a diverse speaker line-up.

Sergey Linev, UI5con@SAP 2019

As UI5con is not an official SAP event but organized by the UI5 community with the assistance of the UI5 development department and some sponsors, we unfortunately can’t pay any speaker compensation.

Conference Content

So, what type of content we are looking for? This question is not easy to answer. At UI5con@SAP, we do not have any specific theme, but any topic that helps others in their everyday work as a UI5 developer is welcome.

Be authentic. Share your experience from your own projects, show best practices on how to use UI5 better or avoid pitfalls. Give a deep dive into a special topic, such as integrating UI5 with other technologies, devices, or platforms. If you have an idea for a hot topic that’s only loosely related to UI5, but will help in dealing with UI5, this will also go down well with the program jury (e.g. something about JavaScript or clever ways to streamline the development process).

As the level of UI5 knowledge of the audience can range from rookie to master, it is not really about being an excellent UI5 developer talking about the latest capabilities of UI5, but we are also looking for topics helping beginners to find their way.

However, what we try to achieve is to compile a program that’s attractive not only to the users of UI5 but also the creators of the framework! One reason why developers of the UI5 framework enjoy UI5con, of course, is that they hope to get some insights and feedback on how the features they developed during the last years are received by the community.

We clearly do prefer talks that haven’t been presented before or have only been presented in another language. But if your proposal fits like a glove, we might include it anyway. Also, if your submission sounds like a marketing show for your company’s product/service, you might want to rethink this. If you talk about your “baby”, it shouldn’t be pure marketing, so it’s therefore particularly important that in your talk you describe the usage in projects and with clients as well as brick-world examples.

So much for the possible content. Now, the important thing is that you adequately describe your topic. Use the available space to describe your idea in as much detail as possible so that you don’t leave too much room for interpretation or speculation for the jury. You have 1,500 characters available to do so – I believe this should be enough ?

You should always ask yourself the question: “When I read my abstract, do I get the idea of the topic and would I want to join this session myself?” What would you say makes your session proposal special? Explain why people will want to attend and what they’ll take away from it.

Session Formats

You can choose between three formats:

• Lightning talk (20 minutes): In principle, every topic can be the subject of a lightning talk. This format is particularly suitable to discuss ideas, present own projects that you’re currently working on, or introduce calls for collaboration. The most important aspect is that you can sum up your message in a nutshell.
• Lecture (45 minutes): Here too, every topic can be presented. This format is ideal to talk a bit more extensively about something you have specific knowledge of. And as this is a developer conference, rather focus on live coding and demos than on slides – of course this depends on your topic ?. But limit the scope: 45 minutes may seem like a long time, but time passes quickly, and you won’t be able to cover “Everything about Project X”. Instead, pick a useful aspect, or a particular technique, or walk through a simple program.
• Hands-on Workshops (90-minute sessions of live coding): As you can tell already by the name, choose this format if you want to teach some hands-on skills to attendees. Each participant should be able to follow your steps. It thus is advisable to bring well-documented handouts with you. One or two co-speakers also would be a good idea to support the audience in case they get stuck. In case you cannot find any co-speaker yourself, you can also ask for support on the submission form and we will try to staff this accordingly.

Hands-on session with Joaquin Recio Huertas, UI5con@SAP 2019

The stated lengths of the sessions include Q&A and a personal introduction. The introduction will be done at the start of the talk together with the moderator.

All presentations should be delivered in English.

Evaluation Process

After the call for proposals has been completed, all proposals will be evaluated by the UI5con@SAP 2020 program jury based on various criteria including: quality and level of details of the proposed idea, its relevance to the UI5 community and the overall balance of the conference program.

And when I say ALL proposals, I mean ALL proposals! No matter who submitted it, whether coming from inside SAP or from the external community, they all will be evaluated by the program jury. Since we really want to have a diverse program, in the past we actually preferred submissions from outside of SAP provided that they got the same assessment as a submission coming from an SAP employee. If you have seen more sessions from SAP than from the external community on past UI5con agendas, this was generally because we got more submissions from SAP employees than from outside. I’d also like to stress that not all SAP employees that we have as speakers are from the UI5 development departments. We treat them like UI5 users from outside of SAP!

Every jury member gets access to all submissions and assesses each proposal in all conscience by assigning a number between one and ten. Finally, the average is calculated from all assessments and the best proposals are accepted according to the available slots. Needless to say that each vote counts equally.

Conclusion

I am already very excited about all the submissions for this year’s UI5con@SAP and hope for a diverse, cosmopolitan, and welcoming community. A community that discusses things that are directly or indirectly related to UI5, listens to each other, exchanges new ideas, and looks beyond their own nose!

I hope this blog post convinced some more of you guys to submit a talk. In any event, I am already very curious to hear your story!

Any questions still open? Leave a comment and I am happy to assist!

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: 2020–03–09 (23:59 CET) -> submit your idea now!
• All submitters will be notified in April
• Registration will start beginning of April. We will announce the exact date in time via the UI5con twitter handle, our homepage, and of course also here.