The Mobile Presenter

FrOSCon is one of my favourite conferences. It is a small-ish but very well organised conference held in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn, Germany). As an open source conference, it is full of nerds and geeks who are all very passionate about their respective topic. Like most conferences, it is also full of bullet point-laden slides that stand in stark contrast to the passion of the speakers in front of them. So I thought I'd try and introduce some of them to the Presentation Zen way of presenting in a workshop custom-made for this target audience, called "Presenting for Geeks".

I try to speak at several events each year. In addition to my favourite conferences, I'm always looking for Calls for Papers from other interesting events. However, there's one thing that has always bothered me about the typical CfP ...

As speakers slowly come to realize the power of using strong visuals in their presentation slides, the issue of giving proper credits comes up. Most of the time, you will be using someone else's photos, so of course you should be making sure that you are using those photos under a proper license, i.e. either pay for the right to use it or comply with the photo's license, e.g. a Creative Commons license. With the latter, a lot of people seem to think that giving credit to the photographer means that they actually have to put the name inside the photo or at least on the same slide.

I've carried around this idea about a presentation demonstrating what's wrong with bullet points in my virtual back pocket for a while now. But where exactly would you give such a presentation? I thought about making it a lightning talk, which are now common at regular conferences. But even then you'd risk alienating many of the other speakers when you tell them - even light-heartedly - that their presentation style just plain sucks.

And then Barcamp Stuttgart 4 came along, and with its "anything goes" attitude, it was now or never. An unconference is a good place to pull off something like that. And even if I were to step on a few people's toes, it's less of a problem than at a conference with lots of full-time speakers ...

So here's the content of that presentation (which I deliberately did not put up on Slideshare, since the slides need some explanation):

At the end of a presentation, there's usually the question: Any questions? And more often than not, it's followed by - awkward silence.

Now, that doesn't mean that the audience doesn't have any questions. For some reason, people just seem to need a moment to muster up the courage to actually ask a question. So if you're a speaker and you encounter said silence - what can you do? Here's a little trick I learned at a recent conference: