php|works and db|works are aimed at PHP and web developers who need to build scalable, robust and reliable applications, as well as DBAs who are looking for information on best practices for open-source and commercial databases.
The theme of this year's conferences is "Lighter. Faster. More Powerful." Our goal is to highlight the ability of languages like PHP and database systems both open-source and commercial to help in the creation of nimble web applications that are modular and can be extended with ease.
The deadline for submitting talk proposals is June 5th, 2006. Due to organizational constraints, this is a firm date that cannot be postponed. As a result, we will only be able to consider your proposals if you submit them to us before the deadline. Thank you!
The speaker package includes free access to the conference, travel assistance and a stipend for each talk given. We invite you to submit as many proposals as you like, remembering to indicate the number of talks you would like to give.
Talk Make-up
All "regular" talk sessions will be one hour long. You can request that your audience have access to a laptop to fully enjoy your presentation (most attendees bring a laptop anyway) and have access to a personal web workspace that includes PHP 4 / 5, MySQL, DB/2 and Oracle Express. However, you should specify in your proposal whether this is a requirement, so that we can pass it along to the attendees if we choose your talk.
Incidentally, our conference have featured this type of presentations for a few years now; we call them Bring Your Own Laptop (or BYOL for short) sessions, and have discovered a few tricks to making them successful:
- First of all, BYOL only works with tutorials. Because of the open nature of this kind of talk, you have to be very familiar with the topic and be able to diverge from your study plan in response to questions from the audience.
- BYOL works very well if you set up your talk as a series of short lectures followed by an exercise. For example, a talk on recursive functions in Javascript can be followed by an exercise that consists of writing a short script that calculates the nth power of a number. In short, you must plan for a set of interactive features, or the audience will feel cheated.
- Because your audience will enter the conference room expecting interaction, you must be prepared to be flexible with your slides so as not to fall too much behind schedule.
Conference Tracks
As in previous years, php|works and db|works will not feature actual "tracks" in the typical sense. Each talk will, instead, be tagged according to a number of keywords that indicate the topics it covers and the expected knowledge level of the audience.In-Depth Tutorials and Seminars
September 12th will feature a number of in-depth seminars and tutorials aimed at providing a selected number of attendees with improved coverage of specific topics. Tutorials are either three (half-day) or six (full-day) hours long, and must be centered around topics that will allow such level of coverage.
Submitting Talk Ideas
If you would like to submit a talk idea, please write to proposals at phparch dot com, indicating the following:
- Your name
- Your e-mail address
- Your website (if any)
- Your experience—why should people listen to you talk?
- A title for the talk
- A synopsis (brief description) of the matter you would like to discuss (50 words or less)
- Audience level, talk type and main topics
- A longer description, including any special needs
- The location where you will be coming from when visiting Toronto
Please note: you must provide all this information for every talk proposal e-mail you send to us. However, you are welcome to submit as many ideas as you like in a single e-mail.
Please use the proposals e-mail only for the purpose of sending us your proposals. For more information, or if you have any doubts, please don't hesitate to drop us a note at our general mailbox.
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