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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

I think it depends on the conference, but my general impression is that mere mortals cannot expect to get speaker spots. In most cases, the organizers or at least the community in general want well-known speakers. There is no way random people are allowed to just walk up there and present. That's probably for the best, since as an organizer you want to have some kind of quality control. I do suspect that's part of the gender ratio problem though.

When I started to do open source development, I tried to speak at several OS conferences. In most cases I didn't hear back, but once they told me in no uncertain terms that they didn't tolerate "no-name" speakers (even though the signup page implied everyone was welcome).

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Paradox. You need speaking experience to speak, but you can't speak unless you have speaking experience.

Yes. From what I can tell there are several funnels that can get you speaker gigs. The most common is probably when your company arranges it or at least puts some weight behind your application and sends you to do a presentation explicitly as an employee of that company. That's what "worked" for me, and I see it often at tech conferences.

The other way would be if you personally know some movers and shakers. I think that's also quite common. From time to time it's so obvious you're going to see speakers talking about projects or subjects that couldn't possibly have gotten up there on their own merits. They're not terrible, but they're sure not doing stuff that's significantly cooler than what most other people in the community do.

The third option is that you're so well known in your community that you technically don't need corporate sponsorship or personal connections, but those probably go together anyway more often than not.

Everybody else is going to have a bad time. Im uncertain if this is a bad thing per se, but it's also easy to see how that precludes the participation of a lot of people who could make a nice contribution. But if speaking is what you absolutely want to do, you could conceivably work your way up from smaller to ever-bigger conferences.

You can always start with smaller local events. In southern California we have the SoCal Code Camp which let me speak with no experience. There's also user groups. Build up a bit of a resume and a name for yourself, then go to the big shows.

Exactly. Just like getting a job you have to pay your dues in a lower position before you get to be the CEO.

Not all conferences are AAA big name affairs. There are literally hundreds of smaller ones across the country every year who are looking to get people with fresh ideas to speak at them.

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