[EuroPython] EuroPython 2004

[Magnus Lyckå]

At 12:47 2003-07-03 +0100, Michael Hudson wrote:
>"Nicolas Chauvat" <Nicolas.Chauvat@logilab.fr> writes:
> > Speaking of talks, I think we should improve their quality. I suggest
> > we use a more formal review process. If you want attendees to be happy,
> > you can not have them listen for half an hour and not learn more than
> > what's on the first page of the web site.
>
>Hmm.  Were the talks so bad this year?  I got the impression that
>quite a few people were first time speakers who (hopefully) won't make
>the same mistakes again.

There will be new first time speakers next year...

I didn't think it was so bad. I can't compare with last year since I wasn't
there, but this was more or less what I expected from the written program,
and of course, that affected my choice of talks to follow.

It's clear that many presenters were unused to their role. There are
many things to consider, from details while talking such as holding the
microphone still, trying to articulate a little extra, avoiding speaking
to quickly, facing the audience, repeating questions from the audience and
not fiddling with pens etc, to lots of issues in the preparation, such as
what to write in the presentation and what to say etc. (Just saying what
it says on the presentation is usually not a good idea.) Anne Ravencroft's
"Perils of Pauline" talk is certainly relevant for presenters to a large
degree.

It did seem to me that most speakers did follow the schedule fairly well.
Unless you have rehersed or have a lot of prior experience, it's not so
easy to know whether your slides will take five minutes or one hour to
present, so I do think that everybody had made an effort to prepare.

I'm sure many of the speakers would be helped by some kind of speaking
course, but that's not really a subject for Europython, although, if we
plan to have a "social skills" track, I assume we could place such things
there, and thus improve the long term speaker quality. There will always
be first time speakers though...

Might there be some other way we can help speakers prepare? Are there
good on-line resources that we can refer them to?

I think the combination of lacking speaker skills and the poor sound and
air in particularly room B is a problem. Perhaps it's better if all the
poor speakers get to use the auditorium? Seriously, if we feel fresher,
and if we can hear clearly what people say, it's much easier to absorb
whatever content there is in a talk, even if it's far from perfect. I do
hope that we won't have that bunker-like echoing room B next year.


--
Magnus Lycka (It's really Lyck&aring;), magnus@thinkware.se
Thinkware AB, Sweden, www.thinkware.se
I code Python ~ The Agile Programming Language