{"id":241,"date":"2026-07-22T21:44:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T21:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/2026\/07\/22\/call-for-first-time-speakers\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T21:44:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T21:44:45","slug":"call-for-first-time-speakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/2026\/07\/22\/call-for-first-time-speakers\/","title":{"rendered":"We Want First-Time Speakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A third of our programme every year goes to people who have never spoken at a conference. That is a target, not an accident, and it is the single thing we are most careful about.<\/p><h3>Why it matters<\/h3><p>If you are accepted and you have not done this before, you get a mentor from the programme committee and two rehearsal sessions on video before the conference.<\/p><p>The talks that people remember are almost never the polished ones. They are the ones where somebody explains a thing they actually built, including the parts that did not work.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two rehearsals, a mentor, and no requirement to have done this before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[38,39],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conference-news","tag-programme","tag-speakers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demos.canvaswp.com\/conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}