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A guide to successful FOSS conference presentationsA guide to successful FOSS conference presentationsPosted Jul 10, 2010 17:05 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)Parent article: A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations
That was a really good article. Now we need one for how to be a good audience member at a presentation. I've given quite a few presentations and I find it obnoxiously rude when people have their laptops on in front of them and are busy on IRC, checking email or whatever. If the presenter has spent 15 hours preparing his/her talk, the least you can do is refrain from futzing with your laptop for one hour. If it's really so important to check your email, do everyone a favour and leave the room. If I had my way, I would introduce a wifi-jamming device during presentations for forcibly disconnect devices from the Internet. :)
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A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations Posted Jul 10, 2010 20:29 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I look at it the other way.
if the speaker is presenting enough information I'll pay close attention.
if they are taking n hour to present 10 min worth of information I'll listen (to catch the 10 min worth of information) while doing something else rather than leaving and missing that 10 min of information.
I honestly don't care how much time the presenter spent preparing. I care about how useful the presentation is. I've seen cases where someone standing up with (near) zero preparation gave a far better talk than someone who prepared for weeks.
long preparation time does not mean that the presentation is good. different people need different amounts of preparation time to give the same quality presentation. This is no different than in programming where some people take weeks to accomplish what others can do in hours.
some preparation is good, and I have no disagreements with the recommendations in the original article, but don't make the mistake of thinking that since it was hard work to prepare that the result must be good.
A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations Posted Jul 10, 2010 22:42 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
I have taken the same view as my professors did in college. I stop the talk, and ask if the person would be better off getting wifi outside the room than in it.
Or put another way, your important time is worth just the same outside the room walls as it is in. The fact that you don't find the talk interesting does not mean you have the right to affect other people who might be enjoying it. [Especially the guy who took a conference call inside, but thankfully the other people were kind enough to take his phone and throw him out for me :)]
A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations Posted Jul 10, 2010 23:02 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
and how do you tell the difference between someone taking notes on their laptop and someone reading e-mail?
are you also going to ask someone who is reading a book to leave the room? if not, why not? what about someone writing on a pad of paper? now what about someone doodling on the same pad of paper? now what about someone writng the Great American Novel on the same pad of paper? what about someone just sketching a picture?
taking a phone call is one thing, that requires making noise which directly prevents people from hearing you.
arguing that this distracts people around the person is both insulting to those people, and meaningless unless you are going to ban _everything_ that could be distracting.
all other ways of people doing things that aren't paying attention to you should be roughly equivalent. it shouldn't matter if they are using an electronic device or not.
if you have some other hold over the people (like grades in a classroom) you may be able to assert additional control of what they do, but nothing will prevent them from finding ways to do something else (comic books in textbooks is a perfect example of this)
A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations Posted Jul 11, 2010 11:16 UTC (Sun) by tonyblackwell (subscriber, #43641) [Link]
I like to type my own notes as a talk progresses; reasonably fast typist, helps me tremendously in going over the details of a talk if it had real information content. Valid point about not distracting others; I try and sit to the rear or side of a hall so no-one behind to be visually distracted.
Most impressive typing I've seen during a lecture was a chap throwing all his comprehensive typed points straight into bullet-point slides in real-time, ready for passing on the information to those who couldn't make it to the talk.
A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations Posted Jul 11, 2010 9:47 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
You are competing with other things that attract attention (parallel sessions, e-mail, wandering in thoughts, etc.), make your talk the most interesting thing to give attention to.
A guide to successful FOSS conference presentations Posted Jul 15, 2010 0:58 UTC (Thu) by fsateler (subscriber, #65497) [Link]
You sound like $random_school_teacher. If people are not listening to you, most probably it's your fault for not being interesting enough, not theirs.
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