Dydh da!
I’m Steve Smith. I’m on the Agile on the Beach speaker committee, with Chris(tine) O’Dell and Gwen Diagram. It’s my 5th year as speaker committee chair, and 11th as a reviewer.
Agile on the Beach 2025 will be our 14th conference. The schedule can now be seen at https://agileonthebeach.com/the-conference/schedule/, and our keynote speakers have been announced – Gojko Adzic, Kate Leto, and Neha Datt.
Agile on the Beach CFP process
Our process supports the Agile on the Beach purpose of sustaining a high quality community, and growing the Cornish tech industry. We also aim to increase session quality and speaker diversity each year. We measure the latter as speakers who self-identify as part of an under-represented minority (URM) group.
The process is in Sessionize, and as follows:
1) Invite reviewers. Ask for reviewers.
2) Send mailing list and social media invitations to submit. Ask for proposals.
3) Send personalised invitations to submit. Send personal CFP invites to potential speakers who self-identify as an URM.
4) Run reviews. This is a 4 stage process:
– Pre-flight checks. Remove unfit proposals.
– Reviewer blind review. With no author details, score proposals from 1 to 5, with constructive feedback.
– Speaker committee blind review. With no author details, mark as yes/no.
– Speaker committee final review. Mark as yes/no, ensuring a balance between high scoring sessions, URM speakers, first time speakers, and Cornish businesses.
– Send speaker invitations. Ask for invites to be accepted/declined within one week.
– Send proposal declines. Thank people for their hard work, and provide constructive feedback.
– Announce schedule. Publicise the conference schedule online.
We’re passionate about blind review. It’s a great way to minimise bias, and create better opportunities for people who need them.
In 2025
Our experiments this year have included:
- Asking authors if they self-identify as part of an under-represented minority in the IT industry. More details of this change are available here.
- Marking a talk as a deep dive or an experience report. We did this to ensure the appropriate mix of talks, as it’s not always clear.
- Marking a workshop as an interactive group exercise or a game. We did this to encourage more game-based workshops, which always have good feedback .
- Adding more pre-flight checks to reduce reviewer workload.
Proposals
In 2025 we had 513 proposals, 33 reviewers, and 5683 reviews. Proposal quantity increased by 28%.
And as always, author motivations are varied!
Sessions
Average scores for sessions are slightly up on last year.
We have 54 speakers this year. 41% consider themselves to be part of an under-represented minority group, while 7% prefer not to say. This is our most accurate view ever on speaker diversity, and we’re pleased with the progress we’re making year on year. But we can always do better, and we’d welcome your feedback at info@agileonthebeach.com.
Thanks to our speaker committee, reviewers, and authors, for all the time and effort they dedicated to Agile on the Beach. See you in Cornwall in July, and remember you can buy your tickets here!
Steve Smith, Chris(tine) O’Dell, and Gwen Diagram