Overview
Thank you for being a Keynote speaker at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, taking place October 11-15, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California + online.
This is your official event speaker guide. Please bookmark this page for easy reference and continue to check back as the event gets closer as we will be adding additional speaker information, such as on-site details, as they are available. If you have any questions, please email the CNCF Content Team.
Please click through the tabs on this page to access information.
Important Dates + Deadlines
- Speaker Registration Deadline: Friday, August 27
- AV Requests Deadline: Friday, September 10
- Meet with Co-Chairs Deadline (virtual & in-person speakers): Friday, September 17
- Pre-recorded Talk Deadline (virtual speakers only): Friday, September 24
- Walk-on Song Deadline (in-person speakers): Wednesday, October 6
- Keynote Stage Walk-Thru (in-person): Varies; See calendar invite for details
Registration
Your registration serves as confirmation that you will be speaking and you will need to register as either an in-person OR virtual speaker by Friday, August 27, 2021.
If you do plan on attending in person, please be aware that anyone coming on site must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and you can review that information on our Health & Safety page.
You should have received registration details in your acceptance email. If you need this information sent to you again, please contact the CNCF Content Team.
All keynote speakers receive complimentary registration. If you previously purchased your registration, please email Cody Liskh to get your registration updated and a refund processed.
Schedule
The schedule will be announced on Wednesday, August 4, and will be posted on our website using Sched.com. You will receive an email directly from Sched.com asking you to create your account. Please upload your photo and bio no later than Monday, August 16.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions, and room locations, are subject to change through Friday, September 3 due to schedule changes that will be made as speakers finalize whether speaking in person or virtually.
Please note that keynote sessions are 15-minutes each and sponsored keynote sessions are 5-minutes each. Keynote sessions occur each morning, October 13-15, 9:00 AM to 10:25 AM PDT. If you have a conflict with the timing of your talk or are having problems uploading your bio and photo, please contact the CNCF Content Team.
Speaker PowerPoint Presentation Template
We designed an optional PowerPoint template for our speakers. Use of this template is not required but we do welcome you to use it for your convenience. Please see the CNCF style guide which covers things like abbreviating Kubernetes as K8s not K8 or K8S.
Co-Chair Meeting + Final Presentation
- Meet with Co-Chairs by Friday, September 17
- Email final presentation to CNCF Content Team by Friday, September 24
We strictly enforce a no-pitch, non-advertorial policy for all of our presentations, especially on the keynote stage. Leading up to the event, please email Cody Liskh to set up some time to review your presentation with one of our co-chairs and ensure the messaging resonates with our audience. The deadline to meet with one of the co-chairs is Friday, September 17, and you must have a draft of your presentation at the time of the meeting.
Helpful Notes on Presentation Design
Obsolete, low-res (i.e., pixelated), and malformatted logos are an epidemic among conference presentations. High-res logos of over 1,000 cloud native projects, products, and companies are available in the cloud native landscape and the serverless and member landscapes. All logos are in the card mode and can be found with Cmd-F or Cntl-F from your browser. Note that all of these logos are stacked, not horizontal, and include the name. The logos are all the most current (or you can open a pull request if they’re not). Also note that the text below the logo shows the proper capitalization of projects like gRPC and containerd. In particular, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have all changed their logos in the last couple years; please use their current one.
Please see the CNCF style guide which covers things like abbreviating Kubernetes as K8s not K8 or K8S.
Inclusive Speaker Orientation Online Course
The Linux Foundation, in collaboration with the National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT), has created an online course designed to teach the viewer about inclusion, diversity and unconscious bias. It is strongly encouraged by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that all our speakers watch the course to learn tips/tools to use when speaking to encourage inclusivity in presentations and messaging.
Code of Conduct
Please read and abide by our code of conduct, which is strictly enforced. We ask that speakers especially review and are careful to be inclusive in the words and images used during their presentation.
Contact Us
If you have any other venue, platform, speaker, or schedule-related questions, please contact the CNCF Events Team.
Visa Letter Requests
If you require a visa letter, please register for the event, and then complete the visa letter request form.
Venue + Hotel Accommodations
This year’s event will take place at Los Angeles Convention Center located at 1201 S Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90015.
We have several discounted room blocks* and invite you to view this information on our Venue + Travel page.*Rooms may sell out in advance of the room block close date – we encourage you to book early to secure a room at the conference rate.
AV Details + Requirements
Any additional AV requests are due by Friday, September 10.
The keynote room will include:
- Screen(s)
- Projector(s)
- Handheld + Lavalier Microphones
- Confidence Monitors – Please feel free to add notes to your presentation deck; you may read these from the stage
- Countdown Timer
- Wireless Slide Advancer
- Lectern
NOTE: You will email your presentation to us and we will upload to the show computers to play from backstage. If you require any additional AV, please email the CNCF Content Team with those needs by Friday, September 10. CNCF will make every effort to accommodate additional AV needs; however, final approval for these requests will be made on a case-by-case basis.
Choosing Your Walk-On Song
Song choices are due by Wednesday, October 6.
We are asking keynote presenters to send us the name of the song + artist they wish to play as they are introduced to the stage. This will be 5-10 seconds of the song, so if there is a specific point in the song you wish to have played, please let us know. Send your song choice details to the CNCF Content Team.
Keynote Walk-Thru
Tuesday, October 12
- All in-person keynote presenters are required to attend a 15-minute walk-thru of the keynote stage on October 12.
- This walk-thru will allow you to become familiar with the stage, what to expect on show-day, go over any AV needs you may have (example: playing a video) and to click through your slides. This is a great opportunity to see if any issues arise and resolve them ahead of the event.
- Please keep October 12 available for this walk-thru.
You will be assigned a walk-thru time slot closer to the event. If you foresee any issues with attending your walk-thru, please let the CNCF Content Team know as soon as possible to reschedule.
Keynote Stage Setup
The keynote stage in Los Angeles will be what is known as a “thrust stage” with a semi-in-the-round seating layout designed to minimize the distance from the audience to the presenter. This unique design will allow our community to better connect with the presenters. There will be audience seating on three sides: front, left, and right of the stage. Because of this uniqueness, here are some tips to pay attention to when navigating the stage in order to address the audience on all sides:
- One easy way to remember to make stage movement is to present one complete thought to each section of the audience.
- With your next complete topic or thought, shift to the right or left and face the next seating section.
- There is no correct order or sequence. Just remember to make eye contact as much as possible in each of the seating sections. There are confidence monitors available facing each of these directions.
- Just remember one thought…one direction, then shift to the next seating section.
Please see an example of what this stage looks like with Kelsey Hightower’s Keynote Recording from our North America event in 2019. You will have approximately 15 minutes to get a feel of this type of stage during your walk-through.
Platform Details
If you cannot attend in-person, you will send us your pre-recorded talk, which will be played at its scheduled time and will be live streamed to the platform.We will be using the virtual event platform MeetingPlay that will allow speakers to deliver content with a pre-recorded talk. The platform is an HTML5 web-based platform, and will be easy for everyone to access and use. All talks will be available on Meetingplay for viewing and we will also be uploading them to YouTube approximately one week post-event so anyone, anywhere, can view them as well.
Pre-recording Your Talk
If you need help pre-recording your keynote session, please let Cody Liskh know by Friday, August 20 and we will follow up with our production team.
