Link - Great Technical Talks
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I stumbled on to Great Technical talks just a day before discussing a preliminary tech conference topic outline with a few teammates.
We’re stressing over content and time constraints. Four guys and two major configuration management stacks just don’t fit gracefully into one hour if we’re measuring success by facts stated and demos executed. Perhaps instead we need a story that will interest the attendees enough to dig deeper into our small mountain of facts and demos once they travel back to their respective offices.
We need life cycle management for our technical talk.
Between now and the conference we can
- Gather a list of people planning on attending our talk
- Ask them if they have any particularly dramatic and shareable success or failure stories.
- Build resources in the form of documents, demos, and perhaps even hands on labs
- Craft a narrative around the stories from step 2 and our own experiences
- Create a survey to gather feedback: in return for an email address and one to three questions concerning their reaction to the presentation we then provide links to the supplemental material created in step 3.
The presentation then becomes significantly less stressful. We can spend time practicing a relatively brief story and delivering it well, with plenty of time left over to field questions and discuss the state of the art with the audience. They’ll pick up links to the survey on the way out the door and in return they’ll have a clear list of next actions.
With survey results and email addresses in hand, we can then keep the conversation moving and help our participants pick up and maintain momentum. Without this crucial post-conference activity we’ll need to give the same talk all over again next year.
That’s my theory, at least.