There's an announcement on the Symfony blog today about the release of parts of the schedule for SymfonyCon Madrid, a conference happening at the end of November (27th - 29th) in Madrid, Spain.

We received a ton of brilliant talk proposals for SymfonyCon Madrid so that we had a very hard time selecting the speakers for the conference but we can finally confirm the first speakers! Year after year, it’s been harder to choose among the great talk proposals you all submitted. We’d like to thank very much all the people who submitted!

Among the sessions released so far are talks like:

• Feature Flags with Symfony
• Life After Assetic: State of the Art Symfony 2 Frontend Dev
• PHP object mocking framework world: let's compare Prophecy and PHPUnit
• Filesystem Abstraction with Flysystem
• Unleash Postgresql features in your PHP developments

These are just a few already released, so be sure to check out the rest of the post or the schedule itself for more details and talk summaries.

in this new post to his site, Bradley Holt - an organizer of the Northeast PHP Conference - looks at one of the difficult struggles for events right now...getting more women to submit to speak at conferences.

We opened up the call for papers for the Northeast PHP Conference about a week ago. Guessing by the names, it appears that we have a very low number of women who have submitted talks.

He includes some quotes from this post by Courtney Stanton about how she was able to get such a high female submission rate for her event. The basic idea was to offer "consulting" services on their ideas and drafts of presentations to help encourage and bolster their confidence in the event. Bradley is offering to do the same for this year's conference, for anyone - not just women.

The Northeast PHP Conference is being held in Cambridge, Massachusetts August 16th through 18th

The PHP Argentina conference officially announced the sale of the tickets for this year's event (happening October 4th & 5th in Buenos Aires):

As of today we are opening the sale of PHP Conference Argentina tickets. And what better way than to offer a big incentive for those who get them early. [...] Hurry and get your ticket now! There is limited space, so you may be risking being left out. Remember that PHP Conference Argentina is the most important conference for developers in Latin America.

Tickets are discounted 50% off their regular price if you get them before the end of May and the first 50 tickets purchased will be entered into a raffle for a seat at the Speakers dinner. Speakers for this year's event include Rasmus Lerdorf, Derick Rethans, Andrei Zmievski, Mark Story, Nate Abele and Pablo Godel. They haven't announced the schedule yet, but it's coming soon.

For more information about the event or to get your tickets, check out the main conference site.

Lukas Smith has shared some of his thoughts about diversity in software development, more specifically in the community he's most involved in - the Symfony community.

In general the Symfony2 scene is quite un-diverse, at least when it comes to gender. I don't remember ever seeing a women present on a Symfony2 topic at a conference. I think the only one that I have heard speak on Symfony2 is Lorna. Alvaro mentioned that at deSymfony there was a presentation by a female speaker. That being said, skimming over the top 100 contributors I don't see a single female name.

[...] So why is that? How and where did we fail as a community? I mean I can see that we have not put a lot of emphasis on encouraging non white males (I assume despite being half iranian I also count as a white male???) to submit talks. I am not blaming anyone here for that omission, though I think it might be a good idea to change that.

He mentions some of the work that the Python community is doing to encourage this diversity and points out that most of the presenters at Symfony conferences tend to be top contributors and project leads, not just "a white male".

That being said, the topic of figuring out how to fix this in balance isn't a topic that I feel like I have much to add or that motivates me to spend the hours of my spare time I invest in coding.

In this recent post to his blog Ian Barber offers up some hints on presenting at conferences (or other events really) based on some of his experiences at this year's PHP Benelux Conference that just wrapped up in Belgium.

Some of the conversations I had during the weekend were around technical presenting at conferences and usergroups, so I thought I'd collect a handful of the tips that were discussed into a post, and use a few of my favourite speakers at the event to illustrate them.

He has it broken up by speaker, first David Zülke, Rowan Merewood and David Coallier, each with their own highlights of what they did well in their presentations. The list includes:

• Make concepts concrete with examples and demos
• Care About The Visuals
• Project Confidence
• Engage The Audience

Ian provides summaries for each of the points, describing what the speaker did to accomplish it and how it could be put into practice by other presenters.

As posted here by Marc Gear and here by Joshua Eichorn, the PHPLondon user group has announced their PHPLondon Conference 2007.

After the success of 2006 the PHP London user group are staging the UK's second dedicated PHP conference on Friday, 23 February 2007.

The conference will be a low-cost event, costing £50 for the day. There is a 230 person limit on the number of delegates we can support, and demand is expected to be high, so make sure you register early. If you'd like to register, check out the conference's main page and enter your information today.

The conference will be happening over at the Keyworth Centre and speakers attending include Cal Evans (of Zend's Developer Zone), Simon Laws (of IBM) and Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP).