Pune’s IndicThreads, which organizes a number of tech conferences in Pune, put out a call for speakers for its next two conferences – their flagship Java conference, whose 5th edition will be held in December 2010, and a new conference on mobile technologies, whose first edition will be in November 2010. The call for speakers for both conferences is still open (until 31st August) and represents a good opportunity for techies in Pune to get visibility for their work, and a chance for networking with like-minded people without having to pay the hefty conference fees.

Why bother? Here are the reasons:

IndicThreads organizes good conferences. To get an idea of the quality of the conference, see Dhananjay Nene‘s report of last year’s Java conference, where he writes:

The annual indicthreads.com java technology conference is Pune’s best and possibly one of India’s finest conferences on matters related to Java technologies. I looked forward to attending the same and was not disappointed a bit.

He has written a fairly detailed post, including overviews of the sessions he attended, which is worth reading.

Here is a PuneTech article about the IndicThreads Java conference 2 years ago.

Earlier this month, IndicThreads had the first edition of their new conference on upcoming technologies, this one being focused on cloud computing. You can see PuneTech’s coverage (also see this article), the report by Janakiram, a senior technical architect at Microsoft, and this one by Arun Gupta, a technical evangelist at Sun (aka Oracle). That should give you an idea of the kinds of talks that go into IndicThreads’ conferences.

Here are some other reasons I had given earlier as to why you should apply for a speaker spot. The reasons are still valid today, so I’ll simply cut-n-paste here:

• If you’re accepted as a speaker, you get a free pass to the conference.
• Become famous: being a speaker at a national conference is good for visibility, and all engineers should strive for visibility. It’s very important. Almost as important as being a good programmer. (Maybe more?)
• Help out a good Pune initiative. More submissions will improve the quality of the conference, and having a high quality conference in Pune improves the overall stature of Pune as an emerging IT powerhouse.

And finally, I also said this:

I’m willing to bet that many people reading this will think – but I am not an expert. Not true. If you’ve spend a couple of years working on some specific aspect of testing, chances are that you’ve acquired expertise that you can present and add value to the understanding of others. You don’t have to have done groundbreaking research. Have you adopted a new tool that came out recently? Talk about it, because others will not have experience with its use. Have you used an old tool in a new way? Definitely submit a proposal. The others in this field would love to hear of this new wine in an old bottle.

To submit a proposal to the Mobile conference click here and to submit a proposal for the java conference, click here. You have 5 days.

(Disclaimer: In the past, a couple of times, PuneTech has received a complimentary pass from IndicThreads (sort of a “press pass”) for attending their conferences. There are no strings attached to this – and we try to be objective in our coverage of the conference. As per PuneTech policy, we don’t promote the actual conference on the PuneTech blog, since it’s a paid event, but we do promote the call for speakers, since that’s free, and we do reporting of the event itself whenever possible, since a significant fraction of it ends up highlighting technology work being done in Pune.)