Our first round for speaker selection concluded recently, with a blind vote carried out by organizers to choose the speakers. This meant only the title, topic description and intended audience were listed on a form and points awarded by each organizer based on the content of the speaker’s pitch.

These were the criteria for the first round of speaker selection, listed in order of priority:

1. Is the subject relevant to WordPress, and the categories of its adoption: developer, user, business and community?
2. Is the speaker’s pitch refreshingly new, and not ruined by a publicity attempt?
3. Does the speaker’s pitch display enough knowledge of the subject?
4. Has the speaker delivered good talks in the past?

At the end of the blind vote, the points by all organizers were added up for the final speaker list of the first round.  As organizers, we have always encouraged speakers from Sri Lanka to take the initiative for this event. Hence, local speakers were granted a few extra points at the end of the vote.

So, these are the five speakers shortlisted and confirmed, along with the titles of their talks:

1. Takayuki Miyoshi — Lessons Learned from Ten Years of Plugin Development
2. Rahul Bansal — Selling WordPress to Enterprises
3. Karen Arnold — Great Support Matters: Bridging the Gap between Developers and Customers
4. Himash Tehan — Using WordPress as a Mobile Backend
5. Harshadewa Ariyasinghe — How Design Thinking can Change everything
6. Dwain Maralack — How WordPress Taught me to be an Engineer

We still have a few slots remaining, and hence are carrying out a second round for speaker selections. The deadline is midnight UTC, 9th August, 2017.