The Mobile Presenter

Meetings tend to always have the same length - an hour, usually. But is there a reason for this, other than tradition and the default setting in organiser software? Why not schedule a meeting to only take 22 minutes? It's the same with presentations. Why do they have to take an hour? Why not 15 minutes including Q&A?

When you are asked to give a presentation, have you considered a format other than the usual hour? How long do you really need to cover your topic? Don't feel obliged to fill an hour when it would only take you 20 minutes to discuss your main point. Adding content that's not strictly relevant - just so that you can fill a timeslot - won't make your presentation any better or more memorable; quite the contrary actually.

FOSDEM is Europe's biggest open source conference. It's organised entirely by the community and in addition to being about all things being free as in freedom, it's also free as in beer, i.e. there are no entrance fees (although donations are welcome). For over 10 years now, literally thousands of geeks from all over Europe assemble in Brussels on the first weekend in February every year

I'll be attending FOSDEM again this year (Feb 2+3). I will also be giving a short presentation: a 15 minute lightning talk in the Testing and Automation devroom. The title is "What's our Status?" and this is what I submitted as the talk's summary:

Here's a tip when designing your slides: Stay away from the edges. By which I mean that you shouldn't put anything important near the four edges (left, right, top or bottom) of the slide as it may be cut off when the slide is projected.

You've probably seen them, too: Slides that have a photo on the right - and a list of bullet points on the left. They're neither fish nor fowl - slides that are halfway there, but that indicate that the presenter couldn't quite let go of bullet points yet.

These sorts of slides are both good and bad news.

When trying to explain that there is a better way to do presentations, people often agree - only to find excuses why they are not doing it that way (yet). The 3 most common excuses I keep hearing are:

1. I don't have the time
2. I can't use photos for this topic
3. My audience wants numbers