The Mobile Presenter

At an event that I attended recently, the conference pack included the usual feedback form. It was a bit smaller and printed on stronger paper, so it was more of a card than a sheet of paper. At the closing session of the event, one of the organisers reminded the attendees to leave feedback and put the feedback cards into the provided box. Said box stood on a nearby table. It was half-transparent and the sun happened to be shining on it at that moment, so you could clearly see that it only contained one feedback card at that point (which happened to be mine - I had just filled it out before the closing session). The woman was clearly shocked and had to ask her team if someone had emptied the box before (answer: no).

While having only one feedback form at the end of a full-day conference is indeed a bit on the low end, an overall low return rate at that point shouldn't really come as a surprise; it's a simple matter of logistics.

So this week's topic was learning. On a personal level, I took an evening course to refresh what's left of my French (not much, as I quickly found out). And then I attended a local congress on the topic of lifelong learning; which sort of provided the view from the other side. On top of that, my weekly repost of an old article on Twitter happened to be about learning something from your own presentation, which was a nice coincidence.

As presenters, we should of course be willing to learn all the time. We learn about our topic. We learn how to give better presentations. We learn how to interact with people.

Imagine that you're going to organise a conference. Obviously, you would need speakers. There are two ways to get speakers for your event: You can invite them or you can put out what is commonly called a Call for Papers (CfP for short).

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, btw. Keynote speakers are often invited, for example, whereas the rest of the speakers might be selected via a CfP.

Anyway, let's assume you're going to do a CfP. You're probably going to set up a web form for potential speakers to fill out. You want to know their name, biography, the title of their talk, and a short summary of what they're going to talk about (commonly referred to as the abstract). Hopefully, you'll also provide a text field where they can explain to you, i.e. the conference organiser, why they think they would be a good match for your conference.

In my ongoing exploration of the local startup scene, I got to watch yet another pitching contest. In this case, it was sort of a relegation round as part of a series of pitching events: Those startups who won the audience vote in previous contests but did not win the actual contest were given another chance. So we got to see pitches from teams that had been through all this before.

Since I just discussed rehearsing too much: Hans Rosling is a speaker who is known to rehearse thoroughly. But even he is not immune to technical problems.

At TED Salon Berlin, the first official TED event in Germany, he was one of the most famous people on the list of speakers, so the audience waited for him with some anticipation. And then, only a few seconds into his talk, he ran into technical problems.