The Mobile Presenter

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:

Lists of tips for presenters seem to be popular these days, so I tried to come up with my own, both from a speaker's point of view as well as from that of a visitor, i.e. what do I expect from a speaker? While preparing this (short) list, I realized that it all boils down to one simple rule: Respect your audience.

I attended FOSDEM last weekend. This is one of the biggest open source events in Europe. So it was full of geeks, i.e. very smart people who are very passionate about their respective subject.

Unfortunately, many of the slides on that weekend didn't show the same level of enthusiasm. In other words, many a presentation consisted of nothing but slide after slide filled with bullet points.

But there is hope.

The term "tough room" usually refers to a tough crowd in said room that a presenter has to deal with. Well, here's a case where it was actually the room (if you can even call it that) itself that was causing me problems ...