Speaker Guidelines

Manchester Tech Nights is a community-led event that is targetted at all parts of Manchester's (and the surrounding areas) tech community. Topics are limited to anything that is of interest to that tech community! The only thing we ask is that the talks are of a knowledge-sharing nature. Talks which simply sell a product or a service will generally not be selected for an event.

What do we like to see>

The best talks generally combine an introduction to something with a story of how that thing has helped you, and what you learned on the way. Shared experiences are really powerful, and most people who attend Tech Nights do it because they want to learn. The following topics are just some examples of the kind of thing that our audience would love: agile, new development techniques and trends, QA, lean, startups, devops, content production, UX, marketing, project management, recruitment, managing/leading development teams, SEO, accessibility, security, enterprise, cloud, networking, and anything in between.

If you're considering a technical talk, please bear in mind that typically around 50% of our audience don't come from a development or similar background, so please pitch these appropriately! Technical talks are more than welcome, but please bear in mind that the audience come from a range of disciplines, and programming backgrounds, so keep any assumed prerequisites to a minimum!

What are we about?

Manchester Tech Nights aims to show off Manchester, from across all disciplines, and across all backgrounds. We deliberately aim to encourage a diverse line-up, and we want diversity across all of it's aspects: from gender, race, age, to levels of experience and background (startup to SME to enterprise). We want to make sure we hear from all of Manchester's tech community, and we're especially keen to find first-time speakers, especially for our 5 minute slots (5 minutes isn't enough time to panic during a presentation!). For first time speakers, we can provide additional coaching/advice if required!

There are two types of talks for the main event:

• Typically one headline talk, between 20-30 minutes in length at the start of the night
• Up to 4 lightning talks, ranging between 5-10 minutes, which occur after the pizza break
• There are also 30 second elevator slots which are organised on the night.

Are you interested in speaking at Tech Nights? Please get in touch at hello@manchestertechnights.org.

On the night

On the night itself, we have the following guidelines

• To simplify from having to swap machines on the night, we usually just present from a MacBook Pro, which has Keynote on it (can also open Powerpoint), and Google Drive, etc. Please send your presentations over in advance so we can check it opens on that laptop! However, it's worth bringing along your own laptop too as a back up, in case something goes wrong (fonts are the usual culprit). The projector generally has a HDMI or VGA adapter, please make sure you bring any dongles with you! Of course, if you'd prefer, you can present without a projector.
• We aim to keep Tech Nights a fully-inclusive event, so please consider your talks "12A" rated.
• On the night, we start setting up 30 minutes in advance. Please arrive at the venue no later than 15 minutes in advance so we can check everything's in order and working, and you won't give Chris a nervous meltdown. If the door is locked when you arrive, please ring and we can let you in.
• We don't usually use amplification for the talks, as the space is close enough for everyone to be able to hear. If you have any videos or audio clips that you'd like to use as part of your talk, we can arrange something for that, but please be there with plenty of time to do a full tech check!

Any questions, get in touch! If you're selected as a speaker, Chris and Mike will share their phone numbers with you by e-mail