AOTB 2026 Call For Proposals Report

January 14, 2026

Dydh da!

I’m Steve Smith. I’m on the AOTB speaker committee, with Chris(tine) O’Dell and Gwen Diagram. It’s my 6th year as speaker committee chair, and 12th as a reviewer.

AOTB 2026 will be our 15th conference. The 2026 schedule is now live, and two of our keynote speakers have been announced – Patrick Debois and Veerle Verhagen.

 

CFP process

Our CFP process supports the AOTB purpose of sustaining a high quality community, and growing the Cornish tech industry. Our goal is to achieve high session quality, year on year, and that’s determined by on-site attendee feedback. The leading indicators from the CFP are high proposal quality, and high speaker representation. 

Our process is:

    1. Invite reviewers. Ask past speakers to be reviewers
    2. Send CFP invitations. Ask the AOTB community
    3. Send personal CFP invitations. Ask people in under-represented minority groups
    4. Run reviews. There are four rounds:
      1. Quality checks. Remove unfit proposals 
      2. Reviewer blind review. Score proposals from 1 to 5
  • Speaker committee blind review. Mark as yes/no
  • Speaker committee final review. Balance high scoring proposals, under-represented minority groups, first time speakers, and Cornish businesses
    1. Send speaker invitations. Ask for invites to be accepted/declined within one week
    2. Send proposal declines. Thank people, and provide constructive feedback
  • Announce schedule. Publish the schedule online

 

We’re passionate about blind review. It’s a great way to reduce bias, and create better opportunities for people who need them.

 

In 2026

We announced some 2026 changes when the CFP opened:

  1. Commit to experience reports. Remove deep dive theory talks and only have experience reports
  2. Lighten reviewer workload. Lower the proposal limit per person from three to one
  3. Reduce travel costs. Remove the beyond Europe expense type
  4. Stripe GenAI across tracks. Mark experiences as no AI, AI assisted, or AI native

High proposal quality

In 2026, we had 212 proposals, 51 reviewers, and 3674 reviews. The overall proposal count was 59% less than 2025, which we’d expected due to our CFP changes. In 2025, 50% of proposals were theory talks, 40% were a second or third proposal, and 14% asked for beyond Europe expenses.

 

Our 2026 CFP changes encouraged higher quality as well as lower quantity. Average proposal scores increased from 3.06 to 3.71. The % of high scoring proposals increased in every track, which was great to see.  

 

 

High speaker representation

We have 55 speakers this year. 37% consider themselves to be part of an under-represented minority group, while 13% prefer not to say. We continue to make progress on speaker representation. We take this very seriously, and we always welcome feedback at info@agileonthebeach.com. 

 

 

Thanks to our speaker committee, reviewers, and authors, for all the time and effort they dedicated to AOTB. We’ll see our 2026 speakers and attendees in Cornwall, in July! And remember you can buy tickets here! 

 

Steve Smith, Chris(tine) O’Dell, and Gwen Diagram