On watching: Conference Submissions and Presentations: Made More Effective with 10 Quick Tips: Matthew McCullough

How to Make an Effective Proposal

Frame Your Topic

• Teach a skill that you know very well and other are weak at
• Change opinions about something that is viewed as hot (or not)
• Share a story of how something worked out well
• Recount how a process didn't work for your team
• Tell you learned a hard lesson
• Do a technical deep dive; human friendly

Investigate the Audience

• Ask the organizers:
  • What's the demographic?
  • What background do they have?
  • What do they want to learn?
• Ask the attendees
  • Query previous attendees
• Adjust for maximum audience impact
  • What is the technical level of the audience?
  • What languages do the audience members primarily program in?
  • Diversity: what social factors make a difference? Age? Race? Etc.?
  • What educational background?
  • What languages will they know?

Craft a Story

Your talk is a story. Design it and build it with that in mind.

1. Exposition
2. Rising action
3. Complication
4. Climax
5. Falling Action
6. Resolution
7. Denouement

Write a Proposal

Think about the weight of your words. Make it more concise, but impactful.

• Brief, but impactful
• Title: 4 - 8 words (The Case for Haskell)
• Abstract: 2 - 4 sentences is best (tease the tech, the story)
• Exposition: Clarify what you're giving

Get inspiration from other proposals.

Market Your Talk

• Get the message out there; fill the seats!
  • Tweet
  • Lanyrd
  • wherever you can
  • Engage your network!

Design Your Talk

Different from implementation of your talk, e.g., slides and demos.

• Sketch your ideas
  • Tiny notebook is perfect
  • Encourages minimalism; get to the point!
• Linearize at the last possible moment
  • Collect all the beneficial pieces

Build The Talk

This can be deferred into very late into the process.

YOU are The Talk

Slides are merely a support - don't let them take away from the story. Let them be secondary to being

Practice The Talk

Less than 10% practice their talk even once. Thesis: quality/impact would increase greatly if more people took the time to review and rehearse.

Lower the stress; increase the impact.

Seed Satisfaction

What does this mean? Place friends in the front row. People who are rooting for you. They will ask questions, clap, root for you. It becomes infectious, spreading like a posi=virus across the rest of the room.

Just Talk

Time to make it happen! "The audience members are your friends". Why? Because they expect to learn something. They're here because they want to learn what you're teaching. Make it worth their while.

Feedback

"A responsible presenter has one more activity to do" - gather feedback. Why? Not only to improve, but also...?

Provide a feedback channel - this is your task. Give them a preferred means of speaking with you, especially a public channel to communicate with you.

Vent and direct the steam. Own your talk and ensure that people get what they wanted.