It’s that time of year again! The DevZone Call for Presentations for Dreamforce 2016 is live, and it’s time for you to submit your ideas for a killer session about your experiences and expertise. Sessions presented by community members (like you!) make up a majority of the sessions in the DevZone, and we want to know what cool stuff you have built, discovered, or want to share with your fellow Salesforce developers.

We had hundreds of submissions last year and expect even more this year. The Call for Presentations submission process is quick, with only a few questions to help us understand what it is that you want to present. Below are a some good rules of thumb when architecting your session, and how to outline key aspects in the Call for Presentations submission.

4 Tips for a Successful Submission

1. Your session must demonstrate or be related to App Cloud technologies (and there are a lot!) and be relevant to the Dreamforce audience.
2. Show and tell, not just tell.
   • If you’re doing code: show the code, explain the code, and share the code if possible (i.e. GitHub, unmanaged packages, etc).
   • If you’re are doing button click development: show the steps and explain the steps.
   • If you’re are sharing a use case: find the nugget of ingenuity and show and explain.
3. Clearly express the key takeaways for the audience. Ask yourself, what are the most important things that they need to know or get from this presentation?
4. Architect your title and abstract to be specific and set expectations as to what the session will cover.

Set Expectations with a Title and Abstract

A session needs a title, and the title should be clear about the topical focus of the session. The abstract elaborates and provides details on that title. Be explicit on what you plan to present in the session and address what you plan to show. For technical sessions, it’s a good idea to let people know if there are assumptions about knowledge of a particular language, library, framework, etc and if the content is targeted at novices or experts.

For example, if you were giving a session on baking a cake, don’t simply say “This session will cover how to bake the best cake you’ve ever had!” Be specific. Focus on what you’ll show rather than the outcome in order to set expectations on what content will be covered in your session. A better alternative would be something like, “In this session, we’ll cover the basics of how to select the best ingredients, make a schedule that includes prep work and order of operations, and finally walk through the recipe.”

Submit Your Session Ideas

If you have an idea based on a project you’ve worked on or an app you’ve built, submit it! If you are not sure if your idea might be covered in another session, submit it anyway! We are looking for lessons learned, methodologies for building better apps, tips, tricks and best practices, and everything in between. We want to help you share your knowledge with fellow Salesforce developers, and also ensure the content you want to learn about in the DevZone is in the session lineup at Dreamforce this year.

Thank you for the awesome work that you do! Let me know if you have any questions either by email (dcarroll@salesforce.com) or on Twitter. The Call for Presentations will be open until May 31, so be sure to get your submission in before the deadline, and tell your cohorts to get their submissions in too!