Tue, 24 Oct 2006

Conference Preparation

Speaker confidence

Probably the most important requirement to be an effective speaker is confidence. Confidence in yourself, confidence in your mastery of your subject, and confidence that you know that what you are saying (together with your slides, assuming you’re using some) are combining together sufficiently to convey the message you are trying to deliver.

One of the things that causes doubt while you are speaking is wondering if you are getting through to your audience. Often when you are trying to explain the intricate detailed technical aspects of something, you can’t help but wonder in the back of your mind whether you have explained enough context for your listeners to understand.

The catch, of course, is that you can’t get around this by explaining every last bit of background. There’s no time for that, and you’d lose the interest of your audience for sure. So you summarize, try to paint a picture, and hope that you have brought people along sufficiently for your main point to drive home.

I’ve started to wonder if we might be able to improve on this a bit.

Organizers’ concerns

Meanwhile, one of the (many) issues that the people running a conference go through in selecting presentations for the programme of their event is pondering the question of whether or not a proposed topic will be of interest to the audience.

Certainly once a speaker and their presentation are accepted, then the concern of the organizers is to ensure (ie, hope for the best) that each presentation will be not only of the highest quality, but of interest and benefit to those who attend. After all, there’s nothing worse than walking into a room and having no idea at all what the person speaking is talking about.

Speakers’ confidence and organizers’ confidence. It occurs to me that these issues are not unrelated.

Preparation?

At technical conferences, our audiences are our peers: highly intelligent, respected contributors in their own right. They might not be an expert in your particular thing (though you never know) — but they wouldn’t be listening to you if they weren’t interested.

So the question is, what can we do to help people who want to be better prepared so they get the most out of a presentation?

I used the term “homework” in as the zeroth step in a series of emails I recently wrote, but it was pointed out to me that for the conference context, homework has far too many connotations of “compulsory” to describe what I am trying to get at for improving one’s experience at a conference. So perhaps “preparation”?

In what form?

So here’s the question: what form should such an endeavour take?

Some have suggested to me that blog posts in advance of an event can seed the waters. That’s true, but even when an event has it’s own planet-type aggregator, there’s not necessarily a very high likelihood that the attendees to your talk will read your post. And in any case, blog posts aren’t generally of the detail and breadth that you probably want to be conveying as background material.

Another idea is handouts at the event. I’ve seen quite a number of business consultants do this, and it can be quite effective when it takes the form of speaking notes. There’s always the minor detail that if you give handouts that people will spend all their time head down reading them and not paying attention to what you’re saying. And there’s the logistical overhead of producing the damn things in the first place.

Traditional conferences (academic symposia, and the more established technical conferences like USENIX + SAGE’s renowned Large Installation System Administration conference and related Australian conferences) have long required full papers (perhaps with peer review, perhaps not) which are published in the conference “proceedings” and most of the time give to attendees when they show up, ie before they listen to the presentation. If they’re really diligent, they can read up ahead of time to figure out what the authors are on about and in so doing get more out of your presentation and ask you intelligent questions.

That’s all well and good for conferences who require written paper and which publish them in official proceedings, but not everyone does that these days, and more to the point, writing a formal paper represents an enormous level of effort. Certainly for more casual gatherings (ie, most open source conferences) it is prohibitive, and even for more featured events it still represents a barrier to participation. I don’t know about you, but in most cases, I’d rather be coding.

So what else? Many conferences have custom software they use to run their web site and and often you can browse by schedule, topic or speaker. That might be a good place to collect and publish background material, though it is ever a challenge to come up with a good web user interface for this sort of thing. If the conference had a Wiki (many do) that could work too, assuming it was organized sufficiently ahead of time — one page per presentation or presenter, perhaps. In either case, the catch is getting audience eyeballs to the material before the presentation.

What do you think?

Hm. Any other ideas?

Bear in mind that regardless of any ideas here, a presentation still has to be as vibrant, informative and interesting as possible for all attendees and that, in the end, no assumption of preparation can be made.

Nevertheless, I definitely plan to help people who want to get more out of the presentations I make in the future. It will help them, but even more importantly, it will improve my confidence, and hopefully that will improve everyone’s experience.

AfC

conference-preparation, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/conferences at 12:21, 24 Oct 2006.

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