[Chennaipy] Talks for the Next Meet

[Shrayas rajagopal]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 11:20 AM, James Mortensen
<james.mortensen at synclio.com> wrote:

[...]

> Making the lightning talks 20 minutes instead of 10 might make the idea of
> giving a talk scarier to some people, so maybe we can have some flexibility
> there for first time speakers.

Maybe we should make the messaging clear. A better model would be to
have talks that can be all the way from 5 minutes to 20 minutes? I
don't think we decided anywhere that talks *should* be 20 minutes
long?

> Also, I think another idea that could help is if we could get a group to
> help people prepare for their speeches.  In my public speaking class in
> college, the instructor suggested we practice in the same place where we'd
> be giving the speech, so maybe IMSc would let a group come in on the 3rd
> Saturday to practice in front of a small group of people.

This sounds like an idealistic thing to do but the availability of
people and the venue would become very big variables in the execution
of such a plan. For example: I would really love to help people with
their presentations and patter but I work on 3rd Saturdays so it would
not be possible for me to make it in spite of the fact that I'd want
to help.

Maybe another way to think of this would be to use talks at user
groups like Chennaipy as practice for higher level conferences like
the PyCons. We're a closely knit set of people with a lot of us being
recurring members now. Many of us want to help each other and I don't
think there will be too much of judgement imposed on first time
speakers (if any at all).

> Another idea is to do group presentations.  We have people who I suspect
> would be more comfortable if they were up on stage with another person and
> not just themselves.

This I like and something that I will +1 for. I don't know why this
hasn't come up yet. Group presentations make sense now that we can
have talks for 20 minutes.