The Mobile Presenter

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 ...

In Presenting with the iPad, I explained how the room's limitations happened to work to my advantage, given that I wanted to run the presentation off of my iPad. I thought it would be interesting to see how other speakers would deal with the limitations of this specific room. Thanks to froscon.tv, several videos from other sessions from the same weekend are now available. I've picked two below where I was mainly interested in the topic, but also watched the speakers' performance.

Please note that I don't want to criticize my fellow speakers here - I was merely curious to see how others presented in this specific room under the same circumstances (well, minus the iPad).