Talking ’bout my Presentation
April 27, 2007 – 4:27 pmMy Knowledge Gardening talk at Penguicon went very well. I was delighted with the interest in my talk and the discussion afterwards. I had put in a lot of prep time putting what I knew into slide format and researching examples (saved to my links library) of knowledge gardening (though the practitioners don’t always call it that), some of which I referred to during the talk and Q&A. I also spent some precious con time adding Penguicon-specific images to my slides. People liked them, and laughed at the ones I meant to be funny, so I felt it paid off.
Penguicon overall attendance: over 800
My presentation’s length: 1 hour
Q&A Length: 30 minutes (after my hour-long talk)
# of other events scheduled at the same time: 13?, including the wedding of one of the founders of Penguicon
# of attendees at start of talk: about 20, including professional librarians, knowledge managers, and various open source project participants.
# of people who left before Q&A: Only 1!
# of people who asked questions: about 10, including people who addressed each others’ questions in their questions (i.e., not just a Q&A but a group discussion, which I was happy to foster)
Feedback: One of the folks I gave a dry run to before the con said it was the shortest hour presentation he’d ever heard (yay!). Matt Arnold (head of programming for Penguicon 5.0) said “her presentation and ensuing discussion were stimulating.” Constructive criticism was that there were a couple of times where I was so deep into the material that I didn’t make it clear enough to the audience what the connection was between one of my gardening metaphors and knowledge work. I hope the Q&A helped address that, but that’s something I’d want to rework if I give the talk again anywhere.
I had said I was going to take the slides (which are not standalone; I didn’t want a wall of words behind me distracting the audience from what I was actually saying) and construct blog entries or a wiki section from them. However, one person who’s been published in Linux Journal suggested I turn it into an article for them (perhaps with more of a how-to focus, or more like reviews of different tools). I’m not sure if “we purchase first rights” would preclude conference presentations, blog entries, or what.
3 Responses to “Talking ’bout my Presentation”
Wow!! Sounds like you had a very successful presentation. I’m happy for you. :) Additional kudos to you for possibly publishing this either online or in dead tree format (perhaps both) through a publication such as Linux Journal. You may want to see a legal advisor before entreating such an arrangement, but it sounds like you’re already thinking about that sort of thing.
As an aside, were you able to view the footage of your test run before Penguicon? If so, I’d be interested to know how that changed (or did not change) your presentation.
By DrFaulken on Apr 27, 2007
Thanks!
Unfortunately I was not. Movies used to play fine on my laptop, but for some reason for the .mov it said I would have to download new software Quicktime … though I thought I already HAD Quicktime) to play it. What’s more, (something’s funky with sound on my home Linux box. So I didn’t get a chance to watch it until this week. The in-person feedback was very useful, though! Now that I’ve watched the movie, I can see the eye flip, hand motions and hear the um’s and verbal semicolon — most of those, I hope, were minimalized at Penguicon by my having changed the presentation around (order of slides) so I wasn’t doing as much remembering-examples-on-the-fly.
By configures on Apr 28, 2007
Sarah: I’m delighted to read [belatedly] that your presentation was so successful. It’s hardly surprising, given the compellingness of your gardening metaphor. I don’t see a followup post with your presentation. If you are [still] interested in sharing your slides, you might consider SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net) - a sort of YouTube for PowerPoint (with features for commenting, favoriting, embedding in blogs, etc.).
By Joe on Sep 7, 2007