Call for talk proposals: !!Con West 2020!

!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) West is a radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. If you’ve heard of !!Con, it’s the west-coast version of that! If you haven’t heard of !!Con, that’s okay!

I’m very excited to be part of the team bringing !!Con West to UC Santa Cruz for the second year in a row. !!Con West 2020 will be held February 29-March 1, 2020 (the Leap Day weekend!), and our call for talk proposals is open until December 8. We’re looking for talk proposals on any computing-related topic that excites you. We like weird things — if it brings you joy but it’s too weird or too niche for other conferences, it just might be perfect for !!Con West. The only requirement is that there must be at least one exclamation point in the title of your talk!

Like !!Con before it, !!Con West anonymizes talk proposals before reviewing them to help remove bias from the review process. We also offer travel funding to speakers who request it, and a $256 honorarium to every speaker.

I could go on at length about all the reasons why I think !!Con West is special, and why I think that new and experienced speakers alike should submit talk proposals — but you don’t have to take my word for it! Here’s what a few of last year’s speakers said about their !!Con West experience:

• “Had a great experience at #bangbangconwest this weekend. It was a treat to be able to participate in such a lovingly-crafted event full of so much enthusiasm and positivity.” — Alex Rasmussen (speaker, “EarthBound’s almost-Turing-complete text system!”)
• “Shout out to the organizers of #bangbangconwest @bangbangconwest — this model of conferencing is particularly inclusive and thoughtful. You all modeled a world I would like to always live in” — VJ Um Amel (keynote speaker, “Glitch Nuggets of Resistance!”)
• “#bangbangconwest is the most delightful, diverse, and inclusive conference I’ve ever been to! (Plus I learned more in two days than I think I have in the prior two years 🤯❤️)” — Eric Weinstein (speaker, “Value Your Types!”)
• “Thank you for an amazing @bangbangconwest. I had a fantastic time and met wonderful people!!! I feel so inspired and filled with joy!!” — Jennifer Wang (speaker, “IMUs FTW!! Building IMU-based gesture recognition!”)
• “Thank you #bangbangconwest for renewing my faith in the existence of a fun, friendly, inclusive, and interesting computing culture” — Eric Fischer (speaker, “if … then … else had to be invented!”)

If that sounds like something you want to be part of, please consider submitting a talk proposal to !!Con West this year!