Submitting proposals for a conference - back to noob status

There was a time in my life when submitting papers to and for conferences was something I did quite often. I was much younger, had more time on my hands and a bursting amount of creativity (there we go again with the whole rekindling my creativity thing.

So recently, on my side of the world, there was a tech conference I really wanted to go to but regrettably could not make it. I was however reminded that it had been years since I’ve put in anything, whether it be going to conference, be a speaker there or just submitting papers and going through the anticipation of whether my paper made it through or not. I have to admit, it seemed things had gotten stale all this time I was focusing on just one thing: do my job and do it pretty darn well.

So I found myself a conference I am very much interested in. I probably should look at a couple of others. As they say, don’t put all your eggs into one basket. However, I also needed to keep in mind that I haven’t done this in a very long time. Once I am certain of what my interest is, I probably at some point would publish the link to said-conference. In the meantime, looking at what was required to submit a proposal, I was faced with an interesting set of problems:

• The conference requires submission of at least 3 proposals. This allows them to try really hard to get you in.
• The topics have to be very specific and yet broad enough to build up interest. After all, one does want enough people to attend one’s workshop / speech yes?
• One needs to know the chosen / selected / proposed topic in detail: this one is quite interesting because I’ve got broad knowledge of the things I do as well as really detailed knowledge. But the question remain, how do I take a whole bunch of code, remove any specificities and present it to a bunch of people in order to augment their knowledge.
• And finally, oh yes finally, there is always that thing in your mind that keeps saying: surely, if I know all this stuff, why wouldn’t the rest of the world (here conference participants) know it as well. Would they find it too easy (and maybe it shouldn’t be a conference topic), not advanced enough (am I wasting their time) and so on and so forth. But I reckon, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

The point is, getting back to blogging and trying to figure out interesting topics for this conference would probably push me to go through that creativity rebirth I’ve been dying for.

I’d be really interested in what others out there do. Have you had to submit a set of topics as proposals for a conference in your industry? How did you go about it? How did you get to select topics that weren’t too academic in nature, were interesting and pretty good enough to get through the sea of competitive proposals that the conference committee is certain to receive?