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I'd always wanted to speak at a conference.

I almost attended DrupalCon Boston, but decided it wasn't worth the money (I was a poor college student, and I was probably wrong).

When I attended my first DrupalCon, in Chicago, I was in awe of the speakers. @Crell, @mortendk, @eaton, and @heyrocker are the four I remember most. I knew I wanted to speak, so I submitted a session for DrupalCon London, to no avail. And then for Drupal Denver, still no luck.

I began to comb through session submissions and the accepted sessions list. This was back in the days of session voting, but even then it seemed the track chairs knew better than to trust voting blindly. I began to compile some basic data, and analyze it. Unfortunately all of that was lost on an old laptop, but it led me to realize one thing: at least half of all accepted sessions are given to previous speakers. And while that seemed rather daunting, it also meant that almost half of sessions were given to new speakers. But what had I done wrong those two times?

Then I realized that in order to give a session in the track I really wanted, I would first have to plan a good session for a track with the right numbers. When I counted it all up, the "Community" track had the least submissions, but a roughly equal number of session slots compared to other tracks. So I came up with a community-based session I knew I was still passionate about, and I was lucky enough to co-present Dealing with Buggy Modules or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Issue Queue with @juampy72 at DrupalCon Munich.

This past DrupalCon Portland, I was given the opportunity to be a featured speaker in front of a crowd of 600+. Quite a step up from co-presenting in a 20 person room! My strategy had more than paid off, now I was a "past DrupalCon speaker" and had that extra leg up on other submissions.

That said, if you've never spoken at DrupalCon before, especially if you just proposed a session for Prague and it didn't get accepted, look over the different tracks and decide if there is some other track you could propose a solid session for (the community track has been discontinued, it's now its own day, so no repeats of my little "scam").

One word of advice: Never, ever, propose a session on a topic you are not knowledgable and passionate about.

The data below is taken from the DrupalCon sites themselves, and will be kept as up to date as possible. I hope it is as useful to you as it is interesting to me.

I hope to see you all in Prague, please consider attending my session: Drupal 8 Routing: The Method in the Madness.