While we’re on the subject of speaking at Flashforward — ever since reading Aaron West’s post earlier this month, “How to be a Poor Presenter,” and then Zeldman’s “Conference Speaker’s Pledge,” I’ve been trying to think of some wisdom I could impart after eight years of watching Flashforward presentations from backstage. Here are a few that seem important to me. Anyone is free to add more in the comments!

• If something crashes, don’t panic. Everyone in our audience works with computers every day — these are your peers and they understand that these things happen. It’s not a magic show where you must keep the strings from showing. If you recover gracefully, it can be pleasantly humanizing.
• Have a graceful recovery plan. Only copy of your source file corrupt? Network card just smoked and you need to be online? Have five minutes to kill while your machine reboots? Think about what sort of calamity could break your presentation, and try to plan a workaround. Run the server on your laptop. Put your files on one of our stage machines, so you can jump over if yours glitches out.
• The screen is large but small. The native resolution of the projectors is 1024×768, so set your screen to the same resolution and get comfortable — save your workspace layouts so you can quickly toggle between different modes, and be sure your code is BIG and high contrast.
• Fill your time. We’ve standardized on 75-minute sessions, which is usually enough to go into real depth about a subject. Please do! If your Standard Conference Outline is tuned for 60 minutes, and you decide to spend the last 15 on Q&A, that’s fine, but if there are no questions, have enough material ready to keep talking. Better still, rework your outline and find the places where an extra example or discussion adds value. (Also: don’t save the best for last, then run out of time!)
• Share your secrets. Everyone in the room is already impressed by your work, or they wouldn’t be attending your session. So do more than just show them your portfolio — talk about the process that led to these final products, the challenges and discoveries, the resources you turned to for help, the best practices you established as a result. Give away your source code, and highlight the cool bits. Attendees should ideally be inspired to stay up all night practicing what they just learned from you. (Seriously!)
• Practice, but not too much. If you’ve never been on stage, or even spoken up much at team meetings, it can be intimidating to present a session. A bit of practice with friends or in front of your webcam can help you identify your worst verbal tics and remind you not to mumble. But on the other hand, our attendees have amazing BS Radar, and if your persona is too brightly polished you’ll lose their attention. We like our heroes humble!
• Party Gently. Getting the Flash community together for some face-to-face fun is one of the main goals of the event, but if you sleep through your session (whether in bed or on stage) then you let everyone down. Give us 75 minutes of your best effort, and the rest of the trip can be fun! (And if you know that 9 am is never a good time for you, tell us and we’ll schedule you after lunch instead.)
• Flash is not a four-letter word. We have one or the most diverse audiences you’ll see at a technology conference: old and young, artists and programmers, students and grandparents, liberals and conservatives, citizens from around the world… even women! They all care desperately about your work, but they may not be quite so interested in your politics, or what you grunt at your fallen enemies in Halo. When the first two rows are filled with your best friends, it can be easy to forget that you’re meeting everyone else for the first time. Politeness != Censorship.

And finally, my Top Ten Tech Tips for the stage:

1. Bring your own power adapter & video dongle.
2. Turn off sleep, hibernate, screen saver, screen dimming, etc.
3. Turn off all auto-updaters (apps, OS, virus defs, newsbots, etc.)
4. Turn off your friends (cell phone, IM, Twitter, email, etc.)
5. Set your video out to 1024×768, 60 Hz.
6. Set your volume to about 75% of maximum and let the audio tech adjust from there.
7. The ethernet is faster & more reliable than the WiFi.
8. Come to rehearsal so we can double-check all that for you.
9. Watch the speaker timer.
10. Hide your “secret files.” Not just the stuff on the desktop, but in recent items, bookmarks, history, etc.

I’m sure I forgot twice as many as I thought of… tell us your biggest onstage mishaps! (Anonymously if you prefer…)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Culture, Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.