The Mobile Presenter

Update: After some back and forth, the workshop is now scheduled for Saturday, April 19 at 1pm. Please double-check the schedule (aka Fahrplan).

Do hackers need communication skills? Why yes, they do. Hackers, by which I mean the good guys, often make important discoveries and need to be able to explain them. The NSA scandal is a prime example, but other issues (e.g. security issues in websites, routers, or smartphones) are found almost every day and their consequences are often hard to understand for the general public. So whether the result is a talk at a security conference or a press release, it's important that the hackers improve their communication skills so that they can explain their findings to an audience that is not intimately familiar with all the details.

At Easterhegg, the traditional meet-up of Germany's Chaos Computer Club over the Easter holidays, I'll do my little share and offer a "Hacker's Edition" of my Presenting for Geeks workshop.

Stuttgart (Germany, where I live) has a lively startup scene. For startups, as you can probably imagine, presentations are of enormous importance. Whether they're presenting to investors or potential customers - the problem is always the same: Having to convince the audience that this new idea works and is worth buying into. Many founders of startups, however, are more familiar with the (often technical) details of their operation than with the concepts of effective presentation. In making basic mistakes in their presentation, they may fail to reach their target audience and put their business at risk.

To help startups better understand how and why modern presentations works, and in cooperation with Startup Stuttgart, I'm going to give a special "Startup Edition" of my tried and tested Presenting for Geeks workshop on April 15 (6pm to 8:15pm) at Coworking Stuttgart.

I will be giving a presentation about "Crafting more effective technical presentations" at the ACCU Conference (April 9-12, 2014) in Bristol (UK).

Here's what it's about (this is the abstract I sent in):

What do you do when Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, is paying Europe one of his rare visits - and you don't really have the time to organise a seminar (like in previous years)? You get a small crowd of presentation enthusiasts and Garr Reynolds fans together, assemble them in one of the nicest locations in Paris and see what happens.

I'm a geek. I enjoy doing geeky things and I also enjoy watching fellow geeks doing or talking about geeky things. So a meet-up of Open Source geeks, such as FrOSCon, is an event I'm very much looking forward to all year.