Keynote Speaker Guide

Thank you for being a keynote speaker at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, taking place 18-21 April at RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and virtually via the MeetingPlay virtual platform.

This is the official event speaker guide for Keynote Speakers. 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 Cody Liskh.

Please click through the tabs on this page to access information.

• Speaker Registration Deadline: Friday, 24 February
• AV Requests Deadline: Friday, 17 March
• Set up meeting with Co-Chairs Deadline (virtual + in-person keynotes): Friday, 17 March
• Pre-recorded Talk Submission Deadline (virtual keynotes only): Friday, 24 March 
• Presentation Slides Due (in-person keynotes only): Friday, 31 March
• Walk-on Song Deadline (in-person keynotes only): Friday, 7 April
• Keynote Stage Walk-Thru (in-person keynotes only): Scheduled closer to the event

Your registration serves as confirmation that you will be speaking with a deadline of Friday, 24 February, 2023.

• Anyone coming on site, please review our Health + Safety page. We ask that you please check back for updates as we get closer to the event.
• You should have received registration details in your acceptance email. If you need this information sent to you again, please contact Cody Liskh.
• All keynote speakers receive complimentary registration. If you previously purchased your registration, please email Cody Liskh to have your registration updated and a refund processed.

The schedule will be announced on Wednesday, 8 February, and will be posted on our website using Sched.com.

Note: Keynotes are 15-minutes and sponsored keynotes are 5-minutes. Keynote sessions occur each morning, 19-21 April, 9:00 AM to 10:25 AM CEST. If you have a conflict with the timing of your talk or any issues uploading your bio and photo, please contact Cody Liskh.

We designed an optional PowerPoint template for our speakers. Use of these templates are not required but we do welcome you to use them for your convenience. Please see the CNCF style guide which covers things like abbreviating Kubernetes as K8s not K8 or K8S.

• Meet with Co-Chairs by Friday, 17 March
  • Virtual Keynotes: Pre-recorded Talk Submission Deadline by Friday, 24 March
  • In-person Keynotes: Email final presentation to Cody Liskh by Friday, 31 March

We strictly enforce a no-pitch, non-advertorial policy for all of our presentations, especially on the keynote stage. Leading up to the event, we will send out a link to set up some time to review your presentation with one of our co-chairs and ensure the messaging resonates with our audience. You must have an initial draft of your presentation at the time of the meeting.

Helpful Notes on Presentation Design

Obsolete, low-resolution (i.e. pixelated), and malformatted logos are an epidemic among conference presentations. High-resolution logos of over 1,000 cloud native projects, products, and companies are available in the cloud native, serverless, and member landscapes. All logos are in the card mode and can be found with Command+F or Control+F from your browser. Note that all of these logos are stacked, not horizontal, and include the name. The logos should be current, otherwise you can open a pull request if they are 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 logo.

Please also review the CNCF Style Guide, which covers important things like abbreviating Kubernetes as K8s not K8 or K8S.

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.

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.

If you have any other venue, platform, speaker, or schedule-related questions, please contact Cody Liskh.

INFORMATION FOR IN-PERSON KEYNOTES

If you require a visa letter, please register for the event, and then complete the visa letter request form.

This year’s event will take place at RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre located at Europaplein 24, 1078 GZ, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 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.

Any additional AV requests are due by Friday, 17 March.  

The keynote room will include:

• Screen(s)
• Projector(s)
• Handheld + Lavalier Microphones
• Countdown Timer
• Wireless Slide Advancer
• Lectern
• Confidence Monitors*

*We recommend that you consolidate your notes as much as possible to increase the font size as large as possible. Keeping it brief will ensure you will be able to easily read your notes while on the main stage.Note: After emailing your presentation to us, we will upload it to the show computers to play from backstage. 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 Friday, 7 April. 

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 any song, so if there is a specific point in the song you wish to have played, please send us a link with the time stamps. All songs should adhere to our Code of Conduct and not include any profanity or suggestive themes. Please send your song choice details to Cody Liskh as soon as you are ready.

Keynote Walk-Through

Tuesday, 18 April

• All in-person keynote presenters are required to attend a 15-minute walk-through of the keynote stage on 18 April.
• This walk-thru will allow you to become familiar with the stage, understand what to expect on show-day, go over any AV needs you may have (e.g. how to play an embedded video), and let you practice clicking through your slides. This is a great opportunity to see if any issues arise and resolve them ahead of the event.
• Please let us know if you plan on showing a live demo on stage as our AV team will need to prepare differently ahead of time.
• Please keep 18 April 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-through, please let Cody Liskh know as soon as possible to reschedule.

Keynote Stage Setup

The keynote stage in Amsterdam 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 of the stage: front, left, and right. Because of this unique setup, here are some tips to pay attention to when navigating the stage in order to address the audience on all sides:

• Practice stage movement by presenting one complete thought to each section of the audience.  
• Shift to the right or left and face the next seating section with your next topic or thought.
• Make eye contact as much as possible in each of the three sections. Confidence monitors will face each direction.

An excellent example of what this stage looks can be found with Kelsey Hightower’s Keynote Recording from our North America event in 2019.

INFORMATION FOR VIRTUAL KEYNOTES

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.

If you need help pre-recording your keynote session, please let Cody Liskh know by Friday, 17 March and we will follow up with our production team.