When the team at MongoDB considers which events to invest in, we do so with the understanding that everyone is operating with a limited budget for travel and professional development. We’re also very mindful of the many other tech conferences and trade shows in the space. With this in mind, we focus our events on the opportunities that provide the biggest, most visible return on your time and financial investment.
So many conferences, so little time
It seems like so many tech conferences are focused on branding and sales pitches. In contrast, we’ve always felt strongly that first and foremost, MongoDB World is a forum for learning. This takes a number of forms: whether it’s learning about new releases on the keynote stage, sharing tips over a beer, or learning in more structured breakout sessions.
To this end, we want to make sure high quality learning opportunities are at the core of MongoDB World. Over the past 4 years, we’ve made an incredible investment in ensuring our conference content is as high caliber as possible. The investment in this curation process and the 60+ resulting sessions at this year’s event are what sets MongoDB World apart from other conferences.
What goes into creating a session at MongoDB World?
Our public call for papers opened in December 2017 and we were overwhelmed by over 200 submissions. The committee responsible for reviewing the submissions was deliberately composed of a balance of gender, ethnicity, seniority, and role. It took this team several weeks to evaluate each proposal as they combed through each proposal looking for the following key components:
- Provides a compelling presentation rich with examples, code or demos
- Appeals specifically to conference attendees at either beginner, intermediate, or advanced levels of experience
- Has a clear and specific learning objective that audience members can use to solve problems in their own organizations
- Provides a compelling presentation rich with examples, code or demos
After this first pass, only 25% of the original proposals were accepted. However, making it through this first, highly competitive stage is just the start.
After being notified that their proposal has been accepted, speakers at MongoDB World begin an iterative process of developing their session with the help of 3 MongoDB engineers, product experts, and Shannon Bradshaw, a former computer science professor, who now leads our Education and Documentation teams.
We’ve always felt strongly that first and foremost, MongoDB World is a forum for learning.
Our speakers are encouraged to steer away from traditional text-heavy presentations in favor of interactive code tutorials and hands-on workshops.
As the event approaches, each session presenter has the opportunity to further refine his or her talk with the guidance of our professional speaking coach. From tips for encouraging audience participation to slide design, these meetings are intended to ensure that every session is engaging and the learning objectives are effectively communicated to our attendees.
More than just free swag
On top of doing everything we can to provide a valuable experience to attendees of MongoDB World, we go out of our way to make the conference memorable and enjoyable for everyone. However, don’t take our word for it. Here are what some of our previous attendees have said about their time at MDBW:
A great way to end the MongoDB World Conference with a beer tasting. Everything was amazing, can't wait till next year #MDBW17 pic.twitter.com/3pOSyPLFqp
— Palermo Deschamps (@palermo_tweets) June 21, 2017
Language popularity distribution as measured by #MDBW17 swag:
— Karl Fife (@karlfife) June 20, 2017
1 Perl
2 C#
3 C++
4 Java
5 C
6 JavaScript
7 Python
Losers: PHP pic.twitter.com/yCIORrjDKr
We hope you’ll make the time to join us at MongoDB World this year!
Passes for MongoDB World 2018 are on sale now. Save when you register as a group. Early Bird pricing ends May 11.