For the past 4 years I had the task of working with the speaker selection committee to solicit speakers for the annual DotNetNuke conference. This is a challenging task as we must filter through almost two hundred submissions to find the handful of sessions that will be presented at the conference. With few exceptions the submissions are excellent and we would be lucky to have any of the speakers presenting at the conference. This year was no different. Not only did we get submissions from speakers who have spoken at past conferences, but we also received a number of entries from new speakers as well. In total, we had 177 sessions that we had to whittle down to 27.
During our selection process, we focus on finding a good balance of speakers and sessions. We want speakers who have presented before and speakers who have not. We want speakers from all over the world and not just from North America. We need sessions that cover our primary themes: Cloud, Mobile, Social, and we need sessions that cover the basics like security, localization, administration and even a few of the new features in DotNetNuke 6. As you can imagine, it can be quite a daunting task. After everyone on the selection committee ranks sessions individually, we get together to hash out the final selection. There is a lot of give and take and negotiation that takes place, but after a couple of hours we are able to arrive at a final list of speakers and sessions. This year we increased the number of sessions by 50% and increased the number of community speakers by 75%. This is a great improvement over past years and hopefully next year we can increase these numbers even more.
Below are just a few of the stats about this years final session and speaker selection:
| Speaker Category | Count |
| Total Speakers | 22 |
| New Speakers | 14 |
| International | 8 |
| Community | 17 |
| DNN Corp. | 5 |
| Session Category | Count |
| Community | 20 |
| DNN Corp. | 7 |
| Cloud | 3 |
| Mobile | 5 |
| Social | 5 |
| DNN 6 | 6 |
| Developer | 9 |
| Designers | 6 |
| Administrators | 10 |
| Business | 2 |
I am happy to announce the following speakers have been selected to present at this years conference:
- Amelia Marschall
- Brandon Haynes
- Brian Dukes
- Bruce Chapman
- Cassidi Brickner
- cathal connolly
- Chad Nash
- Ernst Peter Tamminga
- Gifford Watkins
- Ian Robinson
- Jeff McWherter
- Jeff Smith
- Mark Allan
- Nik Kalyani
- Peter Donker
- Philip Beadle
- Philipp Becker
- Ralph Williams, Jr
- Robb Bryn
- Tracy Wittenkeller
- Will Morgenweck
- Will Strohl
The full list of speakers and the sessions will be available on the new conference website which should be launching in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime I would recommend you signup online to reserve the date and get notified when registration officially opens. Who knows, you might just win the two free 2 day passes to Walt Disney World just for signing up.