Speaker submissions

Have a talk you'd like to give at Chi Hack Night?

Chi Hack Night presentations are 25 minutes or less in length, with an open Q & A session after. Presenters can be any government agency, non-profit, company or group who've made use of data and/or technology to improve the public good.

The Chi Hack Night audience typically consists of a diverse group of web developers, designers, academic researchers, data journalists, activists, policy wonks and curious citizens.

A few rules of thumb for a good presentation:

• Show, don’t tell
• Be honest about what worked and what didn’t
• Don’t try to sell us your product or agenda
• Attend a Chi Hack Night prior to your talk and get a feel for the community

Presentations and subsequent Q & A will be recorded in high definition video and posted publicly on our YouTube channel. Notes will also be taken and published on a public Google Doc.

Some exceptional past presentations:

• #385 Emmanuel Pratt, Sweetwater Foundation
• #345 Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi
• #284 Inside the Water Drain, Chicago Tribune
• #249 Redesigning Access to Michigan's Health and Human Services
• #224 My Building Doesn't Recycle: Designing for Policy Change
• #187 How the Laquan McDonald video got released

Honorariums (speaker fees)

Chi Hack Night offers a standard presenter honorarium of $100 for all speakers to compensate them for their time and expertise (read our blog post announcement). In the case of multiple presenters, an honorarium of up to $300 will be distributed among all presenters.

There are some groups that may have conflicts of interest with getting paid by Chi Hack Night, either due to their relationship to Chi Hack Night or from their employer. For that reason, we will not offer honorariums to presenters in the following groups:

• current Chi Hack Night sponsors
• current Chi Hack Night Members or Board Members
• government employees
• political candidates
• or people otherwise not able to receive compensation for presenting

Proposing a talk at Chi Hack Night

If you'd like to give a talk at Chi Hack Night, write up a brief pitch (2-3 paragraphs) on who you are, what you would like to present on, it's relevance to data, technology and civics, and why it would be relevant to our audience.

Send your pitch to booking@chihacknight.org. We will review it, and if accepted, follow up with the next available speaking dates.