I totally agree with you, that presentation material is overrated and should be subservient to the presenter. And yes, this fact is mostly missed by terrified speakers that recite their bulleted lists to the audience. :^)
Still, we need *some* kind of metric on which to base talk selection. Your recipe below works when the speaker is good. Not all speakers are good. We could ask people, in their talk proposals, to indicate whether or not they are good speakers, but I don't think that will help. :^)
Again, should we try to improve the quality? If there isn't a strong opinion that this needs attention, Heimo and I will drop it. If it is worth looking into, though, how can we achieve it?
--Paul
On Feb 24, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Harald Armin Massa wrote:
Let me second Chris,
This is just to make sure that people don't feel too comfortable on what they already know and try to scrap up the presentations an hour before the presentation.
This doesn't feel too valid to me. I didn't experience this with any of
the presentations given last year, do other people feel that this was a
problem?
Just to give some date: I did two presentations on Europython 2004. "Quixote. Pythonic. Web" and "Selling Pyhtoneers"
"Selling Pyhtoneers" was more than 2 hours; the slides were created on the two evenings before. At least 30% of "Selling Pythoneers" was created on the fly in response to the participants.
I remember that physically small and mentally more than great Zope guy, he did a presentation with well prepared slides which he did not really use - his presentation was exceptionally joyfull because he presented with the people and not for the sake of slides.
Jesus did not have Powerpoint(TM) at all, and still people are talking about his preaching on the mountains.
Mark Shuttleworth had some funny and some impressive slides; the earth from above and him in cosmonautic gear was great - BUT: I am more than sure if he did the same presentation without beamer at a fireplace, the reduction in joy would be no more than .3%
I for myself would rather forbid people to use slides than force them to deploy them early. We use a language without static typing; why should we force people to use static presentations?
(shameless plug: I offer consulting for presentation techniques, better call it "presentation mindset")
Harald
-- GHUM Harald Massa - holistic presentation methods -. Harald Armin Massa Reinsburgstra�e 202b 70197 Stuttgart 0173/9409607
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