Q:

Possible Conference Speaking Sponsorships -- 2011

We're evaluating the feasibility of sponsoring a member of the Ask Ubuntu community to speak at a conference in 2011.
Speaking is a relatively big "ask", so this needs to be planned many months in advance. Let's get started! 
We'd like the community to establish where ...

What relevant Ubuntu conferences are coming up in 2011 that have open speaker slots or calls for papers?

... and then who.

Which members of the community are strongly interested in being sponsored by Stack Exchange, Inc to speak at one of the above conferences in 2011?

To be clear, the speaker is free talk about anything he or she wants so long as it would be roughly on topic for this site -- with a quick acknowledgement of support from Stack Exchange and a mention of the community here.

A:

I'm very interested in talking about Ask Ubuntu at a conference, and I  would be going to UDS were it not for lack of sponsorship money.
These are some Linux-/Ubuntu related conferences in 2011:

Ubuntu and Debian

Ubuntu Developer Summit (May 9th-13th 2011, Budapest, Hungary)
DebConf11 (July 24th-30th Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Linux and Free Software

FOSSCOMM (May 7th–8th, Patras, Greece)
Linux Tag (May 11th–14th, Berlin, Germany)
LinuxCon Europe (October 26th-28th, Prague, Czech Republic)
Desktop Summit (August 6th-12th 2011, Berlin, Germany]

Of those, the UDS and DebConf are essential to our community, Linux Tag, as far as I can tell, is very influential to the Linux community at large.

A:

LWN has a calendar of all these if you want to peruse.
Here's the ones in North America I would target:

Southeast Linux Fest: http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/
Ohio Linux Fest: http://ohiolinux.org/

Normally I would just do a talk at Ohio (I've spoken there in the past) but unfortunately I won't be able to attend this year. I did run into some ServerFault community folks there last year and I remember people talking about it, so it might be a good 2 birds for one stone with the right speaker.
Pity we missed SCaLE, that'd be a nice one for next year.

