Information for speakers

Why speak?

Giving a talk is a great way to share what you know, get feedback on your ideas, and connect with the local data community. Our audience of 80–120 attendees is curious, friendly, and technically diverse – you'll reach people from many different backgrounds and experience levels.

Whether you're an experienced conference speaker or giving your first-ever talk, you are welcome here. We aim to be a supportive space for trying out ideas and practising public speaking.

Practicalities

By default, we expect talks to be:

• About 30 minutes long for a regular talk, or 5–10 minutes for a lightning talk
• In English
• About topics relevant to data professionals – Python, R, Julia, and other open-source tools all welcome
• Not direct product or company marketing
• In line with the PyData Code of Conduct

A typical talk has slides and/or live coding sections, but we're open to creative formats – don't let convention stop you.

What can you talk about?

If you'd like to speak but aren't sure about the topic, here are some ideas:

• Tools and libraries. Have you found an interesting tool or library – in Python, R, Julia, or elsewhere – that you use in your daily work? There are so many out there that others likely haven't discovered what you use.
• Project learnings. If you've worked on a data or ML project – at work or as a hobby – come share what you learned. What worked, what didn't, and what you'd do differently.
• Data engineering and infrastructure. Pipelines, databases, deployment, MLOps, monitoring – the stuff that keeps data projects running in production.
• Visualisation and communication. How do you make data understandable? Tools, techniques, and war stories.
• What's new in the ecosystem. Languages and tools evolve, but it's hard to keep up. Share the new things you've found exciting.
• Developer tools. Editors, command-line tools, testing frameworks, and other tools useful to data professionals.

Talks at all levels are welcome – from beginner introductions to deep technical dives. Our audience is diverse and there's an appetite for both.

To get a sense of what our talks look like, check out recordings from past events on our YouTube channel.

Need help?

If you want help with coming up with a topic, structuring your talk, or practising before the meetup, we're happy to help. Just reach out and we'll figure it out together.

Typical schedule

A typical meetup evening looks like this:

The exact timings can shift. If you have schedule constraints (arriving from out of town, need to leave early, etc.), let us know and we'll adjust.

Recording

We try to record talks and publish them on YouTube, though we're amateurs at it and can't always guarantee the result. If you'd prefer not to be recorded, that's completely fine – just let us know.

Get in touch

Contact us at pydata-helsinki@googlegroups.com or on the Helsinki Python Discord if you're interested in giving a talk. We'd love to hear from you.