Proposal
Writing a good proposal is the first step in getting your idea in front of audience.
Writing is Thinking and a well written proposal articulates the core of your talk for everyone to see. Use these prompts as a mini-outline while drafting your proposal submission.
- Who is the audience for your session? — Think about their backgrounds, roles, and questions. Are they students, early-career practitioners, domain experts, or cross-disciplinary collaborators?
- What problem or question are you centering? — Describe the pain point, curiosity, or gap you want to address. This helps participants understand why your session matters.
- What is the scope of your session? — Outline the main ideas, themes, or steps you plan to cover. It is okay if your work is still evolving – give us a clear sense of direction.
- What will participants take away? — Share the practical outcomes: skills, mental models, checklists, workflows, or new ways of seeing a familiar problem.
- Which format best supports your aims? — Consider whether your idea works best as a talk, group discussion, or hands-on workshop.
Talk Types
Choose a talk style that suits your content and personality. Here are some common styles to consider:
| Style | Description |
|---|---|
| Stories | Weave long & short anecdotes to guide |
| Interactive | Integrate audience engagement with Q&A |
| Demo | Exemplar driven with multiple demos |
| Visual | Show, not tell — anchor through visuals |
| Process | Illustrate process and share war stories |
| Narrative | Singular arc with a main visual showcase |
| Performance | Live visualization & creation on stage |
| Conceptual | Build understanding with stepwise explanation |
Making a great proposal
Writing a great proposal - being specific & descriptive - is key to getting your talk accepted. Here are two examples to illustrate what you should not and should do when crafting a compelling submission:
A Cookie Cutter Proposal
Don't do the following:
- Write a generic introduction, but not being specific about the talk
- Not enough details on what you want to achieve in the talk
- No clear outline on how the talk would be delivered
- No speaker bio to indicate why you are the best person to deliver this talk
Proposal Status: Not Accepted
Thinking Narrative Visualization
An important part of a data scientist/data analyst/data journalist's role is to communicate the insights from the data. Traditional presentation formats have been slide decks, spreadsheets or a BI dashboard. Most of them are designed to be self-served. That introduces a challenge for the analyst - the story she wanted to communicate may not come across naturally.
Narrative visualisation is a way to present analyses, thought processes and insights - all in one document.
This talk introduces narrative visualization and provides pointers on tools and best practices on how to think and design narrative visualisations.
A Thoughtfully Crafted Proposal
Aim to do the following:
- Short & crisp summary about the whole talk
- Context setting around why this talk is different
- Clear steps & details on what will be covered
- Explain how the talk will be technically achieved
- Make clear the objective for the talk e.g. fun live performance
- Establish credibility & capability for delivering the talk
Proposal Status: Accepted
Learning Djembe Visually with p5.js
What if we could learn music visually? It would be great if we could learn the djembe not only by playing it and by listening to it, but also seeing it visually. We will use p5.js to visualise music. That’s it.
Outline
Music visualisation is not new. Winamp and iTunes have been doing it for years. But they are designed to augment the aural senses with a nice visual display. But what if we could visualise music for not only our aesthetic senses but also for learning the music. We all learn differently - aurally, symbolically, visually and kinesthetically. We will have live djembe play and see if we can all learn music visually together. This is a live demo and what could possibly go wrong!
- How can we see sound?
- Can we see how loud it is? Can we see all parts of it?
- We can all tap to a beat. Can we find the beat and show it?
- Can we show the pattern in the beat? Boom Boom Pa!
For the technically inclined, we will leverage HTML canvas and Javascript Web Audio API using p5.js. But basically this is a fun talk to explore creative coding to learn new things.
Requirements
None. Just come and listen and see the music live!
Speaker bio
Amit Kapoor is interested in learning and teaching the craft of telling visual stories with data. He uses storytelling and data visualization as tools for improving communication, persuasion and leadership. He conducts workshops and trainings for corporates, non-profits, colleges, and individuals at narrativeVIZ Consulting. You can find more about him at amitkaps.com and tweet him at @amitkaps
Ashok Kumar is an accomplished djembe - an African drum - player. He has been playing djembe for more than 15 years and has done numerous performances both as a soloist as well as with his band - Shoonya World Music. You can watch him play in this clip and can find more about him at jembeashok.com