# How this directory compares

> Five ways to find a speaker, and the one question that separates them: who decided this person belongs on the list, and what can you check about it without asking us?

## Five models, and who each one answers to

- **Speaker marketplaces** — Listed by: the speaker, by registering. Paid by: the speaker, on a subscription. Checkable: nothing on the profile. It is the speaker's own account of themselves, and requiring evidence would empty the database.
- **Event platforms** — Listed by: anyone who submitted a talk through that platform's call for papers. Paid by: the organizer, for running the CFP. Checkable: real session and event counts — genuine evidence whose limit is structural, since a record ends where the platform's customer list ends.
- **Speaker bureaus** — Listed by: the bureau, as a curated roster. Paid by: the booker, as commission. Checkable: a relationship and a reputation. A bureau will not list someone it cannot bill for, so the practitioner tier is permanently absent.
- **LinkedIn** — Listed by: everyone; it is not a speaker directory. Paid by: nobody, for this use. Checkable: whatever someone wrote about themselves, with no filter for when they last actually spoke.
- **speakerstrail** — Listed by: nobody applies; records are extracted from public conference agendas after the talk happened. Paid by: organizers and agencies. Checkable: the agenda URL on every talk.

## The boundary, as a number you can reproduce

The 39 conferences in this dataset publish their agendas across 23 distinct hosts, and not one of them is a call-for-papers platform whose own directory competes with this one. That check runs when this file is generated, over the same evidence links the records carry — so it cannot go stale.

Read it as a description of where this seed sits, not as a claim that the other directory covers nothing European. The same conferences run their calls for papers on different platforms in different years.

## Where we stop

- **Fees, availability and contact details.** We hold none. A minority of records carry a LinkedIn link-out and that is the whole of it.
- **Anywhere outside Europe.** Not limited — none.
- **Where a speaker is from or based.** The dataset carries the country of the *event*, never of the person.
- **A complete roster.** 39 conferences is a deliberate, hand-sourced slice. Absence is not evidence that somebody has not spoken.
- **Anything that has not happened yet.** A speaker announced for a conference next quarter has been booked, not heard, and is not in here.

## Check it yourself

- [How the dataset is built](https://speakerstrail.com/about)
- [Every conference, with the agenda it was sourced from](https://speakerstrail.com/events)
- [The API](https://speakerstrail.com/docs/api) — every talk's `source_url` is in the response

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Machine-readable index: [/llms.txt](https://speakerstrail.com/llms.txt) · API spec: [/openapi.json](https://speakerstrail.com/openapi.json) · API docs: [/docs/api](https://speakerstrail.com/docs/api) · Sitemap: [/sitemap-index.xml](https://speakerstrail.com/sitemap-index.xml)