We finally let the cat out of the bag by recently announcing our speaker congregation for Virtual Dreamin 2020. Honestly, we thought that selecting speaker sessions was going to be as easy as pie and completely undermined the enthusiasm of our Ohana. The Virtual Dreamin team, received a whooping 350+ submissions for their call for paper, from across the globe for 55 speaker slots available across the following 3 tracks
- Architect Track
- Developer Track
- Admin & Business Analyst Track
Irrespective of whether your session made it through to the final selection or not, we want to send you a BIG THANK YOU for taking out the time and showcasing interest in submitting a speaker session for Virtual Dreamin 2020!
Choosing Right Tool
Even though it’s not part of selection process but extremely important as decision were made on this tool. As a core Salesforce professional our first choice was to quickly create Web to Lead form and surface it on website. Build assignment rules, email alerts, process builders around it & automated as much as we need. In fact our website still has many web forms like this. Only challenge we had was – how to give access to our committee ? In developer org we can only have 2 users. After careful analysis we finalized sessionize. We loved this tool throughout the process. But hey, who knows we might come back on Salesforce ? Other than licensing nothing else is stopping us to implement amazing business process on Salesforce itself without writing any code.
The Secret…
We must admit, the competition was fierce and the evaluation team worked their fingers to the bone to delight us, with the most interesting sessions!
The Virtual Dreamin 2020 CFP selection process comprised of 3 rounds
- Round 1 – Anonymous Selection
- Round 2 – Content Evaluation
- Round 3 – Final Round
The first round of selection was completely anonymous and only the title and abstract were presented to the evaluation team. The speaker details were concealed and selections were carried out only on the basis of how interesting and different the topic was!
Example of anonymous screen
The next round was focused on the depth and clarity of content that the session had to offer to the Virtual Dreamin audience. Especially, with the virtual nature of the event, it was imperative that only interesting topics be selected. The last round comprised of the Virtual Dreamin core team finalizing the speaker sessions. The grueling 2 week selection process ended with the speakers being notified via emails on Apr 1, 2020.
What kind of submissions didn’t do well?
While we do not provide feedback on individual submissions, we definitely want to help our readers improve, by understanding sessions which are a complete turn off. Sessions like the ones below did not make it through.
- Sessions with unclear title
- Sessions with missing or incomplete abstract
- Sessions which lacked clear and focused content
- Sessions which were a misfit in the submitted track for e.g. How to write Aura component (In world of LWC)
Everyone, who did not make it as speakers for Virtual Dreamin this year.. all the best and there is always a next time! We look forward to seeing your speaker submissions next year.
Please register for Virtual Dream 2020 and join us for a fun filled learning event on May 16 and 17, 2020.
May the force be with you!
Leave A Comment