Talks, presentations, and conferences#

Shared folder for slides and presentations#

We have a shared folder with slides in our team drive. Its goal is to provide content that other team members can re-use and share with others. Team members are encouraged to add slides to this folder over time!

If you publish your talk on Zenodo, please add it to our Zenodo community.

When to give talks#

If a talk is virtual and a “standard” talk length, feel free to accept these opportunities to signal-boost our mission and impact. If a talk is in-person and requires travel that is not reimbursed by the organizers, or if it is particularly complex or important, get approval from a team lead at 2i2c before giving the talk.

Below is information to help understand what kinds of opportunities we should look for.

How to prioritize talking opportunities#

Here are a few kinds of talking opportunities that we should particularly prioritize.

Relevant communities that may not know about 2i2c. These are communities that seem well-suited for our services (research/education/public that have need for cloud infrastructure for interactive computing). Our talks here may generate new leads and customers.

Historically marginalized communities. Of particular value to 2i2c’s mission are communities that are historically marginalized in research/education/open source. Connecting with these communities will require active effort, and giving talks is a good way to boost our profile.

  • Conferences or meetups that are primarily attended by / organized by…

    • People from marginalized groups within the home country of the conference.

    • People outside of North America or Western Europe.

  • Conferences or meetups that are explicitly meant for supporting marginalized groups.

Open source conferences. We wish to maintain an excellent track record with the broader open source community. This will feed into our mission, and give us more credibility and trust. We should highlight 2i2c’s open and transparent nature when we attend these conferences.

Large conferences for target communities of practice. Many communities of practice have large “marquee” conferences each year (e.g., the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, or the American Geophysical Union annual conference). These are opportunities to reach large groups of people at once.

Topics to cover#

There are three broad types of talks that we should try to give:

  1. 2i2c “meta” talks. These are talks about 2i2c the organization, our mission/vision/values, and our services. Their goal is to boost 2i2c’s profile and help us become a leader in building inclusive and values-aligned organizations. They shouldn’t come across as “sales pitches” though we should include calls to action if people want to learn more.

  2. Infrastructure topic talks. These are talks where we cover a specific infrastructure topic (either from a developer’s or a user’s perspective). The goal is to demonstrate expertise, signal boost some infrastructure, and highlight the cool things we are doing. They shouldn’t come across as “sales pitches” though we should include calls to action if people want to learn more.

  3. Workshops and trainings that fit within our mission. Training sessions are a good way for us to demonstrate expertise in a particular area, and help us accomplish our mission of building modular and composable tools that others can use on their own. These tend to be very heavy-labor, so we should be careful not to commit to too many workshops each year.