Interested in sharing your knowledge, experience, and vision for the future?
The APWA North American Snow Conference provides education and solutions for public works snowfighters and those that support them. This highly anticipated annual conference offers more than 40 education sessions, technical tours, and a variety of opportunities for collaboration and networking.
The education program provides a dynamic forum for information exchange, problem-solving, and collaboration. Speakers are public works professionals, just like you, eager to help their colleagues manage winter/snow operations more successfully, take advantage of emerging technologies, understand and prepare for the challenges ahead and provide better service to their communities.
What are we looking for?
We are looking for speakers with new perspectives, solid best practices and/or innovative twists to winter maintenance, workforce development, and fleet/operations. At Snow Conference, participants will have the ability to attend sessions from six tracks throughout the event. Within each track, there are presentations specific to that topic. Each year, we receive feedback on what attendees would like to learn more about.
Below is a list of requested topics for 2024.
Information Management for Winter Operations:
- Emergency management of severe winter events
- Winter weather plans and snow/ice control techniques for areas with infrequent winter storm events
- Seven–10-day weather forecasting improvements and maintenance decisions
- Community outreach/citizen interaction
- How to determine level of service
- Environmental resilience and impacts of winter maintenance practices
Innovative Solutions for Snow and Ice Control:
- Use of electric vehicles and how its changing fleet management
- Technology advancement and the evolution of winter operations
- Trending technologies and expanded uses for current technologies: (GPS, AVL, RWIS, smart city technologies, mobile apps, asset management, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, etc.)
Leadership and Workforce Solutions:
- Workforce development and succession planning
- Innovation in workforce recruitment and retention
- Preparing staff for leadership roles when extreme weather happens
- Recognizing career transitions and cross-training between departments
- Increasing staff during extreme weather
Materials Application—Snow and Ice Control:
- Deicing, liquids, blending, and the exploration of the materials used in snow and ice control
- Anti-icing techniques and tips
- Chemical usage and selection
Winter Fleet Operations and Equipment Management:
- Multi-use vehicles—fleet vehicles serving outside winter operations
- Insights on the growing supply chain concern and how to plan for the future
- Snowfighting equipment
- Winter fleet operations and vehicle preparation
- Specification writing and ordering of fleet vehicles
- Maintaining less used fleet vehicles
- Winterproofing fleet vehicles for snowplowing operations
- Establishing timely replacements of fleet assets
Winter Maintenance Planning and Operations:
- Strategies for plowing and disposal, right-of-way management
- Snow and ice clearing/management around facilities, sidewalks, walkways
- Best practices for winter maintenance planning and operations
- Approaches to mixed precipitation challenges
See where these topic areas fall in terms of the “Track” you can select for your proposal.
What are the education session formats?
Please review the options below for the type and length of format you may select. APWA offers five different formats to ensure dynamic education sessions.
- Education Session: (50 minutes)
- Education Session: (75 minutes)
- Thought Leader Presentations: (20 minutes each presenter)
- Innovation Trends Presentations: (20 minutes each presenter)
- Workshop: (120 minutes)
Learn more about education session formats.
How are education sessions selected?
Review criteria: All submissions are reviewed and evaluated by the NASC Program Review Committee comprised of experts in snow and ice control and winter maintenance planning.
Your success in the selection process depends on how well your proposal supports these primary criteria:
- Practical application: Provides information that participants in their day-to-day work settings can use, offers lessons-learned and how-to-do-it strategies, and offers solutions for sustainability and resiliency of public works operations.
- Leading-edge: Addresses emerging trends and technologies, innovative concepts and approaches, and solutions to improve the provision of public works services.
- Relevance and clarity: Content is interesting and useful to a significant number of expected attendees. Participant takeaways are clearly stated using active verbs that indicate how they will benefit from the information presented.
- Participant takeaways: All proposals must include three (3) takeaways that indicate how the attendee will benefit from the presentation. The participant takeaways must be worded in response to the phrase: “At the conclusion of this session, participants will be better able to________.”
Get tips on writing a compelling session description.
Important: Proposal descriptions should be limited to 1,500 characters or less.
View/download instructions on how to write appropriate participant takeaways.
Important: Learning Objectives should be limited to 300 characters or less.
What are the rules?
No sales pitches! Direct promotion of a speaker’s/company’s products, services, or monetary self-interest is not appropriate for education sessions. The public works audience appreciates learning about technologies, services, concepts, and new approaches; but is sensitive to the sales promotion approach. In your proposal, we recommend that you describe how the public works/end-user perspective will be featured in your presentation.
Speaker registration and travel expenses: APWA does not pay speakers of concurrent technical and professional education sessions. Speakers are responsible for making arrangements and paying for travel and other expenses associated with attending the conference. Speakers may qualify for a complimentary single-day registration. Speakers attending the full conference are expected to register and pay the appropriate member or non-member NASC registration fee.
When will I know?
Submitters will be notified via email of the accept/decline status of their proposal by November 2023.
How do I apply?
Please read the following before clicking the Submit button.
Important FYI:
All correspondence sent to you about your submission(s) will be to the email address you listed in the form. If you have a highly restrictive work email account, please consider using a personal email address. You will receive notification of submission via email.
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