The call for speakers is open — and the rubric is public
CFPProgramme Team
The call for speakers for the inaugural chainday.live is open. You have until 5 December 2026 to get a proposal in, and everyone hears back by 21 December — before the holidays, not after them.
Attending is by application and the room is capped. Speaking is not — the CFP is open to anyone, and the review is blind. Most of what follows is unusual enough to be worth explaining.
We publish the rubric before you submit
Five criteria, weighted, totalling 100 points. Practitioner value carries the most at 30, originality 25, technical depth 20, clarity of the proposal 15, and line-up balance 10 applied across the whole pool at the end.
The obvious objection is that publishing the rubric lets people game it. We think that is the point. A proposal written to score well against "can an attendee act on this within a week" is, almost by definition, a better talk. If gaming our rubric produces a stronger conference, the rubric is doing its job.
Review is blind
Within 48 hours of submission, the programme team strips your name, your employer, your bio and your prior-speaking history off the proposal. Judges score what is left.
This matters more than it sounds. In an industry where a handful of companies carry enormous reputational weight, the logo next to a name does a lot of unearned work. An engineer at a regional bank who has spent two years actually ingesting SBOMs at scale has more to teach most audiences than a polished overview from somewhere famous — but only one of those proposals usually gets read generously.
Judges recuse themselves from anything they recognise anyway. It happens; the field is small. Recusal is logged.
Everyone gets feedback
Including — especially — the people we decline. You will get your anonymised rubric scores and at least one line of written feedback from the panel.
This is the single most expensive commitment in the whole process, and the one we were most tempted to drop. We kept it because the alternative is a form letter that teaches nobody anything, and because a CFP that only talks to the people it accepts is not really a community CFP.
What we will reject
Vendor pitches. Not "talks by people who work at vendors" — most of the field works at vendors, and some of the best operational stories come from them. We mean demo reels: a session whose actual structure is here is our product, here is our product's dashboard, here is our product's pricing.
Sponsors get their own clearly-labelled slots and are welcome to pitch in them. That is what the slot is for. It is not what the CFP is for.
Lightning talks exist for a reason
Eight minutes, one idea, no Q&A. If you have never given a conference talk, this is the format to pick. Tick the first-time speaker box and we will pair you with a track chair for coaching between acceptance and the event.
We would rather run a slightly rough eight-minute talk from someone with a genuinely new failure mode than a smooth twenty from someone recycling last year's deck.
Who you will be presenting to
Around 250 reviewed practitioners, and nobody else. Sessions are recorded for confirmed attendees only — nothing is published publicly.
That is worth knowing before you write your abstract. You can show the config that broke, name the tool that let you down, and walk through the incident as it actually went. You are not writing for an indexed, permanent, screenshot-able audience.