all right here we go so uh welcome to the uh Creator con call for Content webinar uh I'm Jason uh and I'm joined with joined by Chuck and Lauren and we're going to talk a little bit about uh Creator con and what the uh call for content is so uh our agenda today uh what is Creator conon what's the call for Content uh who attends uh how can you participate and then we'll have uh talk with our uh some of our MVP speaker alums and then open up for questions so uh let's uh let's visit the agenda real quick uh there we go there we go yeah and then uh let's uh flip over to what is Creator con awesome so uh these are some of our pictures from last year uh creator uh we had our de's app of the Year Awards we've got fun stuff on the show floor you can see Chuck and Lauren uh running our keynote uh and then we've got uh sessions Labs presentations um so let's go to the next slide um so Creator con is a conference within knowledge uh for developers and practitioners everybody who actually makes service now happen in their organization um you know we explore you know creative ways to use the now platform uh you know learning from your peers and getting enabled on the latest features and this is for admins developers Architects anybody who actually builds and customizes on the service now platform so what does that uh what does that mean for all you here watching go to the next slide oh yeah no sorry okay I'm on the west coast and I'm under caffeinated let's talk about the talk about the content um so uh Chuck uh we've got couple of our MVP alums to talk about what it's to submit and speak it to Creator con we'll bring them in in just a second what just want to give you some idea of things if you're new and you've never presented or presented in a venue like this this is not that hard it's pretty low bar you're talking about things you already know things you've already experienced look towards your projects you've done in the last year or two look towards those those implementations those exercises maybe even something you found fascinating at a developer Meetup for example you went I I want to learn more about that and you go and explore it and you play with it on your PDI you've got experience you've got something unique that you can share with others don't think that oh everybody knows this I was just at the Phoenix developer Meetup last night and somebody mentioned something about how long has that been in the platform I said basically forever how come nobody knows about this I saidou just inspired me to make a new video but aside from that it might be a 15minute presentation so what we want from you this is the call for Content you don't have to have the full full presentation fleshed out a title A Creative title an abstract just a short description two three lines about what it is you in plan to present and then the amount of time we've got 1530 and 60-minute increments so pick which one you think you can fill the best everybody thinks oh I'll do a 60 Minute then I'll be on stage if you are at that 60 Minutes you better have a lot of content that is always on and tip from probably one of the MVPs you will always take longer than you think you do I rehearsed this four times at home and it took me 15 minutes and suddenly you're halfway through your slides and it's 15 minutes so it always takes longer in real person take it for me I've been presenting for over 40 years it always takes longer in real person so with that I'd like to bring in our MVPs these are two people that have spoken at knowledge in the past and get their insights to what they talked about and tips for people who may be thinking about this it is a great way to elevate your brand it is a great way to uh be seen as an authority in the in the uh uh in in the ecosystem it's a it's a great way just to be present Lauren any other any words of of inspiration before we bring in our guests so there are a couple of intro tips that I always like to give to people that are interested in presenting uh the first is you don't have to do it by yourself um one of the first times I ever presented at knowledge was because um Dave Slusher needed a co-presenter so he was by far the master of everything um but I had never presented at all so H being his kind of assistant and co-presenter eased me into the process and it was a lot more or excuse me a lot less abrupt than just diving head first so if you have any hesitancy splitting the burden of responsibility between another qualified peer is a great way to do it um another point is that if you think a piece of technology is like the hot ticket item of the summer or at that time the spring you're probably correct which means a lot of people are probably going to be submitting things on that topic geni yeah I didn't want to I didn't want to point out but that's that's probably gonna be it yeah no say gen AI there everybody's gonna be submitting something on geni and if you're super passionate about gen by all means but if you're just trying to do it because you think that's what we're looking for sometimes niching down is the best way to get accepted right especially if it's something that you're already really passionate about like if you're really passionate about specific types of business rules and you need to talk about why they're important that would be you know phenomenal and I think the last piece of information is that you have to sell your topic right um as someone that used to be on the sales team um selling is part of everything and so if you're looking to catch people's eye um really like have fun with creating an eye-catching title I oftentimes referenced like popular YouTubers and things like that with regards to creating basically a clickable title something that someone would add to their agenda um because that's what we will also be looking to build out the entire catalog with so those are my my three points good stuff good stuff and you know I don't want to steal too much Thunder I'm sure they're gonna have lots of words of wisdom so let's bring in Sharon and Harnet welcome thank you for presenting in the past and uh let's do quick little introduction harned tell us a little bit about yourself thanks ja and thanks everyone for having me here uh my name is harnit I'm a certified technical architect and I work with accenta I was selected as an MVP last year as well and I was the I mean I for the first time I presented at knowledge last year so that's me and Sharon I am Sharon Barnes I am a service now developer at Novant Health and I've been in the service now ecosystem for three years and I've also had the uh privilege of presenting for three different years at knowledge including that virtual one that first year excellent thank you very much and uh I just want to ask uh let's start with Sharon what are some of the benefits that you've seen in your career with by presenting at knowledge so by presenting at knowledge it gave me an opportunity first and foremost to get a ticket to knowledge so that I'm going to be blunt that is the first reason that I was like I'll do that because it gets me there but once I was there I had the ability to make connections meet the people who are doing The Cutting Edge development learn and just get a sense of of what's not just hot and new but also what's so well fleshed out and well known and just get all of those different perspectives and build a a great Network that has helped me grow as a developer so that's that's what I love about it plus it's the rock concert of developers I love that we're gonna have to start using that one Lauren yeah much enjoy harn what is what is something you um you learned about making a good submission what what is it that you obviously got selected and and part of that is having a good title and Abstract what what sort of advice do you have for people about that I think um the first thing that really helped me was to join the office as because I had plenty of ideas I mean as we were just discussing about this earlier um there are things that you do in your organization or as your bet projects day-to-day but what exactly makes a good presentation at knowledge is the key so I came up with five different ideas that I could present I brought them to the office our I got them refined or say ion out with Jason and all the developer um Advocates I think that was the key I think that really helped me to decide what that title would be and how do I present it as well there were lot of good suggestions given how do I present it really well or what should the slides be containing and stuff like that so that really helped me to make that presentation say 95% perfect that's a great idea and if you missed that slide we let leak a minute ago we'll come back to it we'll get back to it we have blocks of time specifically dedicated to helping you craft your title and Abstract you can show up and just say I have an idea you know we had people I think it was last year that didn't have an idea and they were picking up ideas off The Cutting Room floor so harn said he had five ideas and and Jason and I were coming up with crazy ideas and somebody ran with one I said we should do a presentation on blah blah blah haa and they would that's actually a pretty good idea I think I'll do that and so sometimes you could show up what we got eight or 10 of these sessions for an hour or so Jason will be there and Lauren will be there and I'll be there and we've got some Mbps that will be there we we've got experts that can help you fine-tune that to give you the best possible uh chance of being selected as as a presenter you don't have to do this if you've got experience and you've got a marketing Talent uh you know it's optional it's not a have to but it certainly doesn't hurt now Sharon uh what what lessons have you learned from the submission process in the past my observations of the submission process and what I've learned from it is the snazzy title is really important I'm gonna Echo what you said earlier Lauren because it's the truth um my very first year I was just like the only thing I know is that I went from being a non-service now person or knowing anything about development and I learned things and that got me to have a job as a developer and I was like that's not worth worth talking about and as I go through and uh got some suggestions for titles it ended up coming to a very real and useful talk about just how do you elevate minorities how do you elevate women by changing careers and eliminating those barriers and so one of the things I have is just don't talk yourself out of talking don't talk yourself out of trying because for me that's the really easy thing to do and I have lots of good people who say do it anyways um but that's that's key use those Creator office hours and find the title that's that's clickable and with that talk about what you know and what you love because that's going to be what you want to put put your time into bring your passion absolutely that that actually brings up an interesting question uh as like a side question you plugged oh that because they'll take the um basically like what you will enjoy doing for the amount of time do you know on average how long it took to actually build out your content just so that people have a a realistic expectation of what that's like as a three time speaker yeah so for doing the talks that are like 30 minutes or 15 minutes those probably took me um a couple days of thinking through maybe a couple hours of putting together the slideshow yeah and I will fess up to doing a ridiculous amount of rehearsal um you said like four rehearsals and I was like you mean 40 rehearsals um wow but that's my personality type I over rehearse for the lab that I did that was huge I would say that was easily at least two to three weeks of of extra solid work um and I was very grateful that I had co-presenters on that so that we could all pitch in and help with that but the lab was very fun very rewarding CU When I was in the room seeing the people get it and have fun getting the concepts that was amazing um but there were moments while building that content that I was like oh my gosh what have I done I love Sean's comment here quantify the value of your title and quick example of that that I've seen is you know the five things I learned before trans translating my instance or you know top 10 tips for blah blah blah service portal widgets just some way to to add some value to the title that'll that will catch eyes Jason did you have any others that you you had some examples that you've seen in the past that worked really well yeah well I mean things that worked well and things that like don't work well like I mean I I always harp on this because there was it was I don't know years ago now but it's kind of heartbreaking somebody had this like great session I you know helped helped work them through it but it had like a really boring title it was like literally just like the name of a feature and their abstract was in this session I'm going to talk about feature name and like their actual presentation was like really good but uh the attendance numbers were really low because you like you couldn't see the passion you couldn't see what it was really GNA be about what you're GNA learn from right so like I'll beat up on gen right if your title's gen a uh there's going to be a bunch of things of gen a like what makes your session stand out about geni or you know if it's me it's metric based because that's my favorite obscure service now don't try to game the system by going this is the best gen session as your title yeah yeah so I mean really like you know you're your your passion really shines through right like you know I mean we we've all been attendees at conferences as well so uh you know have you got to have a good title to get people to read your abstract and you got to have a good abstract to get people to uh attend your session um so you know really it's passion passion passion like we keep saying that but like that is what makes your session compelling and if you are struggling with a title um and we keep talking about gen as a subject matter I mean one thing that's helped even our marketing team internally is using chat GPT for for spitballing things so you can say I'm doing a lab on X make it like a a catchy YouTube title see what comes out you never know even if it's like halfway there at least it's a good idea maybe you never know yeah that's a good idea the do it a couple times and then have your uh friends vote on which one's best there you go right yeah involve the get a small sample focus group of your own there's plenty of people and again show up to the office hours we can give some input on that the remember this is this is a competition you first you're competing to get selected you've got to get us to recognize that sounds interesting that's something that I would attend and then you've got to get when you've been selected and you've built it out you're competing for the conference attendees to come to your session correct so there's two levels to this I mean it's the same material but you want to be thinking if I were a conference attendee would I pick something like this among the competing the because there's going to be multiple things happening in your time slot they could go to your session they could go to this on Flow designer they could go to this one on how to build an app they could go to this one on Source control why would they pick yours you know so you've got to you've got to really uh you know be thinking about that all the time and we're judging with our with our audience hats on so like you know an outline of what you're going to talk about like that you may feel like that may communicate more to us about what you plan to talk about but is that what's going to get the audience in the door and we are we're we're wearing our attendee hats we got another great tip invite the audience with your title yeah that's an intriguing you know there there's lots of different ways to do this that you can bring that up think of it this way too if your session is in like the fifth floor of the Venetian in the back corner what would make people still come they don't know it's there until they have to make that walk though true good point it's room 508k like oh any other questions or or tips for MVPs great information by the way Lauren Jason well well one thing I wanted to ask harn as well so we got Sharon's point of view on how much time she spent did it vary a lot on your end as well or did that sound pretty similar so Lauren I've done my CTA program so it helps to do I mean we've done these final presentations there as well so sort of followed the same process here I I had completed my CTA about in October September October last year and the presentation I mean the selection started in December and I was presenting in May so it was still the same aspect that I followed there so I created the title slides first I had to make sure that the slides are not too many so that people just get bored looking at the slides I just kept three or four slides just got really good numbers flashy numbers on the screens which and I talked about those numbers as I was talking so that people actually look at me when I'm talking um um on the presentation and I came up with a very interesting topic and I think Lauren as you was mentioning earlier what if your session is in one of the corners in the Venetian and people just have to walk a lot to just listen to it I guess it was for mine mine was on the second floor I still had a full house about 250 people joined that session the way I made that abstract I think with everybody's inputs was to keep it very uh intriguing it was very much specific to the developers and Architects how do you design an integration which is performance wise it's really good and you import a million records into your platform and then process them as well so this was my topic so a million records processing in processing intensive uh system integration design how do you prepare that and yeah so so to me preparing the whole deck took me four days uh including adding the slides the numbers onto it and then the rehearsals obviously took more than I guess 15 days so just keep rehearsing it I was even rehearsing it the day before in the hotel uh before my presentation was because it was my first presentation at knowledge so I had to make sure it goes great that's awesome yeah and we'll have separate office hours if you are selected as a presenter for fine-tuning your presentation engaging the audience all of that is coming we wanted to focus this one really on on how to catch the eye catch the eye how to put in a submission it's really not that hard you spend some time on your morning walk or at the gym or something just noodle over I I know I want to talk about decision builder for example how can I make that interesting how can I cap capture someone's attention you know save days of development by abstracting your logic like oh really you know tell me more I I want to save days there's there's there's a there's something intrinsic about you know think as a developer what would interest me what would capture my attention is it is it saving time is it building faster is it you know those are the things that motivate you and if you can capture that Essence in your title and in your abstract that's that's gold one thing I also saw and this might be a me thing so so please correct me if it's like no Lauren that's your personal preference a piece of advice I once received was unless your topic is directly tied to a real life use case like the success your business has had or a specific solution that exists in real life right make the use case fun right I think I mean I I would always look for kind of the wild use cases like I know last year Maria Gabriella did one like on and was that that was the one that you did as wellar yeah that was fantastic like that idea it's so eye-catching um in addition I think Dan Grady did one which was on uh performance analytics but it was about basketball scores and that was to help illustrate the value of performance analytics but it stands out because you're like basketball like why is service not being with basketball so um like I said unless it's directly tied to a specific real life use case of like this is this company's success and this is how we got it you know have have fun with it it's always it's always a f fun ride and and uh actually I'm GNA go back to uh harn's uh uh session from last year right like the what was really interesting about it was like pumping a million records through performant the actual use case he was doing that in was much less important than the uh technology of how to do it because chances of somebody having that exact use case pretty low chances of somebody else needing to do like a high volume integration really high so you know make it fun but also you know kind of focus on the broad and really that kind of sums up to like you know don't get overly specific on the use case because that's probably much more unique to you yes how you did it that's the the how right everybody's coming to learn and if again if you're following your passion whether it's UI Builder service portal Integrations whatever you're you're going to find a way to to share that enthusiasm to share that fun with the audience and and it will come out in your presentation it will come out in your abstract but again run it by us we're happy to help we're we're here to help and that's a great transition to our office hours slide okay yes all right all right so uh now no longer a sneak preview um so our call for content is opening on October 23rd and it runs through November 13 um this link we keep uh blasting out uh Dev link SNCC uh 24 CFC that is where all of our links are uh how to submit uh you'll see us repeat uh some of the tips and tricks for submission links to our office hours so our first office hour is next Monday uh and uh we've got we've got up kind of arranged so that no matter where you are it's hopefully at a somewhat uh not inconvenient time for you uh and uh just kind of like the big ones uh you know we keep talking about you know talk about what you're passionate about um we are asking everybody to decide on the length this year um when when in doubt uh go shorter right like uh it's it's really hard to be super compelling an on point for 60 Minutes uh without like a very you know in-depth demo that everybody's going to be super engaged in and again use the office hours uh you know we we we invited Sharon and her NE here because they did like an amazing job yes with their office using the office hours to polish their submissions and it paid off because they ended up being speakers again so uh with that uh you know let's uh we got a little bit of time left uh let's throw this out for uh any kind of questions from folks we've got people marking it on their agenda love to see that confirmation that the office hours have been helpful one question I have um and this popped up naturally in a conversation Chuck and I were having yester yesterday Jason um because one of the advantages of this program is a ticket to knowledge are there any differences that government employees or things like that need to take with regards to applying uh that is that is a really good question and uh ultimately like licensing questions it's going to boil down to your specific uh agency uh and organization um federal agencies have a variety of different rules uh based on you know where they are and state agencies have another set of rules uh so like at all levels so gener I I can't actually I'm a former government employee and I can't actually make a good statement on you know what to expect I can I can tell you what if you were a state of Washington person what you could maybe do but um yeah yeah definitely uh generally government employees have been able to accept that knowledge ticket but be mindful of it be mindful that that's a m you should double check on your side as well yeah so I mean by by and large uh government employees do get that ticket but there are other uh considerations that you should definitely kind of figure out for your organization one question that dreo has is how to decide on length how do you how can you know from the beginning maybe what would be appropriate lengthwise yeah uh so uh you know if you've got you know something that's kind of like a quick hit you know top top five things uh I wish I knew before uh that's going to be a kind of a 15minute session if you're doing sort of like you know quick hits of information for people uh and uh some of those I've actually seen very successfully backed up with like blogs for in-depth uh like if you want to if you want to go deeper uh you know here are the top five things and here's the short link to the uh expanded version fact Sharon I think you did that one year did you no uh anyway uh then uh 30 minutes uh that's like when you're demoing something right like you know showing off something you've built um you really want to like at a 30 minute session you want to be much more demo than slideware uh you know by by and large um you know watching a bunch of slides gets really boring and it's about three minutes of slide so a 15 minute presentation is not that many slides um but 30 minutes uh you know you're showing off something you built you're showing how you've built it um 60 Minutes would be a very deep dive if you have something that is like super super technical you know I built my own search engine on service now and here's how I did it right that's something that you're going to have to show off a lot of of pieces uh in order to kind of be a full compelling uh story but again um when in doubt kind of go for the shorter version of it um it's not locked in stone if we if you say I'm going to do this 30 minute demo and uh it starts you know you've got a lot of good material we can bump that up like it it's but it what you're communicating in this is really kind of like your target um and you know people want to see what you built they don't want to see slides so yeah and unless of course you know it's an abstract concept like let me show you the data model behind this and how the tables all relate to each other you know that's that's going to be something you want to have like anything architecture right you can't really like you know show an architecture in a demo like that needs diagrams maybe the ER diagram uh in case you missed it the the dates for submission are October 23rd through November 13th so pretty small window we're doing this ahead of time to give you time to think about that so you can be ready to submit as soon as that opens up on the 23rd or if you need a day to think about it as well again office hours open up a week before that so start thinking about those ideas and then you'll be ready to submit and they do overlap so we you could be thinking about it and submit as late as the 13th so we we've got some Runway here just wanted to give you a little bit of info and hopefully you're not watching this after November 13th but we wish you the best and we'll see you at knowledge start thinking about your creator con 2025 submission yeah and that's that's an interesting thing that that we uh got when we were talking to the devies winner as you work on these projects all year long think about would this be interesting to share and and somebody even mentioned it in the uh in the chat practice it at snugs or developer meetups and and and see if there's interest in that topic so you can do these small informal presentations to 6 12 25 people and get that experience that can then lend you to the bigger stage at knowledge so that's not a bad strategy either I have a question to direct to to Sharon and Harney if that's okay uh did either one of you when you uh so some so sometimes a question I've gotten with relation to our content because you it gets you a ticket to know were were either of you ever part of a conversation with a boss where they said where they maybe initially said no to knowledge and you got accepted uh with the ticket is there any time you've had to have the conversation of like well because I have the ticket can you compromise on carrying like the travel costs are there any types of conversations that you have advice for for the people that might be negotiating their trip to knowledge if not it's okay yeah Lauren I think I had um I had that conversation well early in advance as soon as my knowledge uh session was accepted and I also become a developer MVP so that also gave me a a ticket directly to knowledge so both of those reasons combined I presented it to the leadership again uh we were shot shot on the uh people coming into the knowledge uh U from from our unit but then again I made the way because of these two things so presenting at knowledge and being in MVP so both of those things really helped me to get that get that in but it was it was easy to to convince them but I have heard that it it has bit difficult um a lot of times for uh for people who uh I mean in different localities they're not able to convince their leadership to get into knowledge just based on a session so but didn't happen for me I've I've had a similar experience at a previous job I was selected as a speaker for a different conference and I took personal funds to do the travel do the hotel and go there uh because I had you know basically the free pass because I was selected as a speaker very similar situation I found that so valuable as a career investment that it led to other things and other opportunities so don't overlook the personal value on this if the company funds it great if if you get selected as a speaker and and you have to take it out of your wallet it is well worth it every time that's good to know well that's another question then for our MVPs how uh how has the how has been like how how has the experience of having been a speaker helped career-wise like afterward was there any like specific thing that happened afterward that made it like seem really worth it for me I think it has definitely aided in creating connections it has aided in developing my skills and I haven't necessarily gone with the intention of looking for a new opportunity when I went there but I know that some of the connections that I made did Lead Me eventually to you know I would really like to work with this person someday that's really Co and when their job had or their company had an opportunity I applied because I knew the people at that team and it was uh a group I cared about and a goal or a mission that their company had that got me excited as well that's I'm gonna back that up with yes and it's not what you know you could be the smartest person in the room and if nobody knows it it doesn't do your career any good it's not who you know it's who knows what you know so by what you know you are you increasing your career opportunities you don't know where your next opportunity is going to come from it may be somebody in that audience that's going you know Sharon really knows her stuff on this topic she'd be great on my team yeah that's that's where it comes from H it made the interview at those places much easier when they had seen me on stage yes you now have another level up on the competition that's applying for that same role so think about that yeah I think R's got a really good point there so your resume gets shortless quite quickly if you've got that right on your title on your resume or on your LinkedIn profile true will the um will this will the con oh I guess never mind I I forgot my question it it flew out of my mind I was looking in the chat uh Paul did have a question about the office hours and you don't have to sign up for the office hours uh they are all just drop in and you do not need to uh be there right at the start of office hours you can like Drop in Midway through or 10 minutes before the end uh if you have a short question or you got a meeting that ran late uh it's and you don't need to stay for the whole time so uh we're just there to answer questions and help you polish your submission ideas good stuff I think we've covered all the bases and we ready to wish everybody the best of luck October 23rd through November 13 good luck everybody thanks Sharon and Harnet and thank you everybody for watching take care bye bye thanks everyone bye bye