Present­a­tion

Over the week­end just gone I made two planned present­a­tions at Word­Camp UK 2009 down in Cardiff.  I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Cari­bou Theme that runs this site and is avail­able for down­load from Spec­tac­ula.

I also got to mix with some very inter­est­ing, tal­en­ted and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re work­ing with.  In this con­fer­ence were, poten­tially, the next gen­er­a­tion of web cre­at­ors.  People who will make things hap­pen.  And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the poten­tial of Word­Press, its mar­kets, and its uses.

Present­ing at WordCamps

I’ve never actu­ally done a formal present­a­tion in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only per­haps four five in my life.  I’m a techie — I would do tech­nical dis­cus­sions and demos, but never with Power­point and a laser pointer.  I did do an uncon­fer­ence show and tell at Bar­camp Liv­er­pool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.

But I could also appre­ci­ate the bene­fits of put­ting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers.  So in a fit of enthu­si­asm I volun­teered for two present­a­tions — Word­Press in the Enter­prise, and Word­Press for News and Media.  I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organ­isers.  I have no his­tory or back­ground in pub­lic speaking.

Both got accepted.

Damn!

But it had some great poten­tial too.  I could play with approaches and actu­ally ‘test’ the res­ults.  So what did I learn?  Read on:

1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky

The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a bet­ter descrip­tion, V-shaped, with the presen­ted at the bot­tom of the V.  At this event three rooms were in oper­a­tion, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rect­an­gu­lar room for up to 70 people, and a small board­room type for about 15 people.

I had expec­ted my first present­a­tion on the Enter­prise to be the tricky one — it’s not a fas­cin­at­ing sub­ject.  But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engage­ment with the audi­ence.  In the L-shaped room you’re try­ing to look in two dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions.  It’s almost impossible.

2. Con­sider an Assist­ant for Demos

One can work the com­puter, the other can talk.  Saves awk­ward silences, and it’s some­thing I’m going to try in a future talk.

3. Get in Early

I did one of the first, and the very last, formal present­a­tions of the event.  I noticed that in the first every­one was wide awake and very enthu­si­astic.  By the end of the con­fer­ence people were flag­ging.  Get­ting and keep­ing atten­tion becomes trick­ier at this stage.  You also have the advant­age that nobody ever won­ders off from the con­fer­ence at the very begin­ning — it’ll never be fuller!

4. Start Funny

In the Enter­prise talk I star­ted with a humor­ous quote and in the News & Media I star­ted with a pithy quote.  The funny one got the mood lif­ted and people in a cheer­ful mood.  It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.

5. It’s a Great Audience

I was deal­ing with fel­low geeks.  People in the same situ­ation as me.  It was, frankly, the best audi­ence I can ima­gine.  The few present­a­tions I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cyn­ical dir­ect­ors, or senior man­age­ment, or people who have tough dead­lines to meet.  This was a whole lot more relaxed.  Nobody’s going to con­sider fir­ing you because of a minor mistake.

6. Get Engagement

I noticed that speak­ers who asked for shows of hands, asked ques­tions of the audi­ence and so on gen­er­ally had a bet­ter applause at the end than those who didn’t.  It doesn’t take much to engage your audi­ence, but I’ll admit that it’s trick­ier when you can only look dir­ectly at half of them at any one point.

7. Be Prepared

At con­fer­ences oppor­tun­it­ies come up.  Have busi­ness cards, listen to people, smile a lot.

8. Free­bies

You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts.  Good gifts though.  I remem­ber the really rub­bish cal­cu­lat­ors we got given in my ICI Sys­tems days.  What geek in the world needs a cal­cu­lator?  So I handed out the pen­knives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.

9. Matt

I finally met Matt Mul­len­weg at the week­end.  I’d prom­ised him a beer months ago in recon­cili­ation fol­low­ing our (now seem­ingly minor) argu­ment over WordPress’s take on the GPL.  So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat.  He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awe­some’ a lot (but he’s Amer­ican, so that’s nor­mal) and has clearly listened to the con­cerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.

Funny hat tho’ ;-)

Sum­mary

An ace time, basic­ally.  I’d like to say hi to every­one I met, but I’m scared of miss­ing someone — so instead, let’s just say I look for­ward to chat­ting and, hope­fully, work­ing with some of you in the not so dis­tant future.

Here’s to Word­Camp UK 2010!

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