Amazon SNS Subscription Confirmation
E-Mail from a Community to a Speaker
Speaker rejected request
Speaker accepted request

Inspiration

-> Developer communities finds it difficult to choose a speaker to host their sessions. -> They must manually shortlist about 5 to 10 speakers based on the domain, contact them in-person and check whether they’re available at that particular slot. -> This is a hectic task for the organizers of the event. Also at times, the email may end up in the spam folder of the speaker and goes unnoticed. Here, it’s a loss both for the speaker and the community.

What it does

-> Speakers can register and list down their areas of interest, technical expertise, social handles -> The communities can search for speakers based on -> Theme of the event -> Community member -> Speakers expertise -> Language -> Availability -> Location based (Hybrid / in-person events) -> The community organizers can shortlist and send invites to speakers -> The speakers receive invites over their email which is hidden from organizer -> The invited speaker gets information about the community, event, type of event - online/ off-line/hybrid and then decide to accept/ reject the invite -> Once the speaker decides to accept, the speaker gets a sessionize link to submit the CFP. The speaker also gets contact forums / email address / social handle of the community organizer. -> If the speaker rejects the invite, the organizer is notified regarding the same -> The platform will also include features to chat and connect with speakers as well.

How we built it

-> Create an AWS CloudFormation Template -> Create a Stack with new, standard resources -> Approve the Amazon SNS Subscription to receive e-mails from the portal -> Run an Execution of the state machine, so that the e-mail will be sent to the speaker, and he/she will decide whether to accept or reject the offer

Challenges we ran into

-> We faced an issue while customizing the YAML file, but thanks to the amazing support provided by the AWS Community, we were able to fix it easily with the help of our mentor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-> The solution we are proposing is the first ever technical / community based speaker central platform to search / contact and book speakers. -> Sessionize has features for event and speaker management, but lacks a speaker request feature.

What we learned

-> To use Amazon SNS to automate e-mail. -> To send customized e-mails using Amazon SNS.

What's next for Centralized Community Speaker request portal using AWS

-> We're building the frontend using the Laravel framework and planned to integrate with AWS Services in the backend which we've customized and built.