SREcon19 Americas Call for Participation

Overview

This year, SREcon Americas will focus on comprehension, understandability, and predictability. We'll pursue this theme across the technical landscape, foundational principles, culture and values, and organizational aspects of the profession. How do we observe our systems? How do we tackle complexity through being able to see into our systems? How do we understand our systems' interactions with each other? How do we interact together and collaborate as groups of people? And how do our systems impact people's lives?

SREcon attendees want to discuss robust solutions to system engineering problems, particularly in high-stakes environments. Beyond simply presenting new approaches and solutions, explain your reasoning behind them—what principles did you work from? How did those principles guide and shape the solution? If you're presenting a case study, how did you learn and improve from your experience?

The best talks share a team's take on a new idea, or inspire the audience to think beyond the challenges they know. We also welcome sessions about SRE philosophy, and this year we may be offering hands-on workshops, which could range from introductory to advanced topics. New speakers are encouraged to submit talks; many of our past best talks have come from people with new experiences to share.

Please join us in creating an excellent program for our sixth year of SREcon Americas, which will be the twelfth SREcon event globally. In 2018, we had over 700 attendees from over 230 companies, with backgrounds ranging from small startups, through tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, to finance and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organizations.

Proposals

We are looking for proposals in the following formats:

• Talks:
• 15-minute talks with 5 minutes for Q&A
• 30-minute talks with 10 minutes for Q&A
• Workshops:
• Speakers are invited to submit workshops ranging in length from shorter deep dives to longer introduction workshops. Please specify what technical level your workshop is targeted at.
• 5-minute lightning talks with auto-advancing slides:
• We are accepting proposals for five-minute Lightning Talks on any topic related to the practice of Site Reliability Engineering. The length limit is strict, so make sure that you have only one core idea for your talk. Submissions are due on Friday, February 15. Please submit your proposals via the web submission system).

The deadline for talk and workshop proposals is November 6, 2018. We’ll evaluate all submissions and get back to you by December 10, 2018. Accepted speakers will be required to confirm their plan to present along with their presentation information by January 7, 2019.

We will schedule practice sessions for all presenters, regardless of experience, because they help speakers adapt their message to our audience and improve the experience for attendees. Along with confirming their plan to present, speakers agree to participate in the practice sessions (details will be included in the acceptance notices).

Both presenters and organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at srecon19americas_chairs@usenix.org.

Suggested Topics

• Fundamentals
• Designing and building reliable systems
• Measuring reliability
• Automation and managing operational work
• Using failure as a learning event
• Technical Professional Development
• Hybrid cloud workloads
• Taming technical complexity and improving understandability of systems
• Engineering resilience against complex systems failures (chaos) and sentient attackers
• The role of machine learning in reliable, resilient systems; and how to measure the reliability of machine learning systems
• Building internet scale vs financial scalable systems
• Culture/people
• Leveraging diversity to enhance reliability and responsiveness
• How to cultivate, recruit, and retain SREs
• Catalyzing great SRE teams with a mixture of roles, including Program Manager, Tech Writer, UX design, and others
• Ethics and the impact of our systems upon people
• Extending SRE culture to networking, security, privacy, and other facets of technology

Background (overarching goals of all 3 conferences)

SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. Our purpose is to be inclusive as we bring together ideas representative of our diverse community, whether its members are focusing on a global scale, launching new products and ideas for a small business, or pivoting their approach to unite software and systems engineering. SREcon challenges both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in SRE or related endeavors for years. The conference culture is based upon respectful collaboration amongst all participants in the community through critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation.

For more information on the themes and programs of past conferences, see the list of past conferences.

For more detail about how the program committee evaluates and selects proposals, see https://www.usenix.org/blog/srecon17-americas-program-selection-process.