The quality of your droidcon Italy experience will depend a little bit on how good the lunch is, a little bit on how cool the swag is and a little bit on whether or not it’s raining. But the quality of your experience will largely depend on how relevant, timely, useful, unusual, applicable, stimulating, inspiring and personally enjoyable you find the conference agenda.

At droidcon Italy the conference agenda is the heart of the conference and it matters to us that the agenda is right for you. Every year we review the process of how we curate and construct the droidcon Italy agenda and this is the space where we share that process with you, so that you know what goes in to creating that agenda, and so that you can share your feedback and input with us. Thank you in advance!

Where do the speakers and presentations come from?

The speakers and presentations on the droidcon Italy agenda come from three key sources: Call for Papers submissions, individuals that we identify and invite independently, sponsor speakers.

• Sponsor speakers: without the investment from our sponsors, droidcon Italy would not be possible, and speaking on the agenda is one of the most popular form of investment for our partners and sponsors. We’re very clear from the beginning with all our sponsors that their content must be technical content, not sales or marketing content.
• Independent invites: sometimes there’s a hot topic we particularly want covered, sometimes there’s a hot company that we really want to showcase, sometimes there’s a hot business area that we really want represented – whatever the motive, when there are individuals that we think will make a difference to the overall quality of the agenda, we get on and send the invites out.
• Call for Papers submissions: we open a Call for Papers platform approximately five months prior to the conference. This is the chance for anyone from the Android community to submit their idea for a presentation or talk at droidcon Italy. From the submissions (generally around 250) we select a bunch of people to invite to the agenda – more about that process below.
  We use the platform Sessionize to collect the Call for Papers, this is a tailored platform for conference organisers that has a number of advantages, primarily that the users can save their profiles to reuse for other conference submissions! The other major advantage is that the questions and fields that Sessionize asks for are exactly accurate for the needs of building a conference agenda.

Introducing the droidcon Italy committee

In order to maintain the high quality of the droidcon Italy agenda we work with an external committee to provide advice and direction. The committee members are invited based on their track record in the industry, their role in the committee is voluntary – they are remunerated only with a complementary ticket to droidcon Italy, and committee members are not allowed to speak on the conference agenda – this prevents any bias of any kind.

One of our aims is to work with a committee that represents the diversity we want to see on the agenda and the diversity we want to achieve in the droidcon audience. We’re not saying it’s perfect, but we will tell you we’re always trying our best.

You can see the committee members list here.

Ok, so how do you put the agenda together?

The Call for Papers submissions are downloaded, collated and divided between the committee members. The committee review the submissions and decide – based on merit of the speaker and merit of the topic – which submissions should make the final cut of the agenda.

The selected speakers are contacted, and assuming they’re still available, their place on the agenda is confirmed.

Those presentations are combined with the selected speakers (the identified industry leaders we talked about before) and the committee work together to create a ‘flow’ to the agenda. Key considerations are: no conflicting sessions, creating an element of narrative to the agenda, and distinguishing between keynote and track presentations. Sponsor presentations are included in this curation, and also evaluated for the merit of their content and positioned in the agenda based on best ‘fit’ with other themes and speakers.