The speaker app allows speakers to set up their profile, prior to or as part of the proposal submission phase. The dashboard is the means through which speakers manage their own profiles.
We are planning to make the Speaker model more pluggable so, if you have particular fields you'd like your speakers to fill out, you'll be able to customize things more easily.
Because symposion supports additional speakers being attached to a proposal or actual presentation, it has the notion of a Speaker that is not yet a User on the site. For this reason, a Speaker may have a NULL user field (hopefully temporarily) as well as an invite_email and invite_token field for the invitation sent to the additional speaker to join.
perhaps explain the invitation flow