It’s a presentation for a reason

One of my biggest pet peeves is people reading from a Powerpoint slideshow when giving a presentation.

The powerpoint slide show is to guide your audience about what YOU are presenting, speaking about. It should NOT convey all the information nor should it be YOUR (The speakers) guide or prompter.

Ideally, the speaker should “know” the topic and speak from his/her mind and allow the bullet points/diagrams to connect what you are talking about.

It is quite irritating that the speaker turns away from the audience to look at the screen to gather his/her thoughts or determine what to talk about next. For the love of the audience, stop referring to the screen and look at the audience when you are talking to them.

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My blog feels neglected. And not without reason. I’ve barely posted recently. Though there has been a lot to write.

A combination of work, mental imbalance and guilt of not working on my applications has kept me away from typing out anything. Also, I want to make a lot more private posts to put my thoughts into words, but only for myself.

The blog itself is also neglected since the theme is fairly old and I’ve not changed it for a while. No idea if any of my plugins have been updated nor have I upgraded wordpress itself (though  this is partly because I am thinking of moving over to Habari. If only Habari were a little more stable. But I digress)
But the guilt of my apps does not let me. Once the apps are done….

A new hypermarket (what is a hypermarket anyway?) or a shopping complex has been constructed right NEXT to my apartments. This is on a stretch of the road which is exceptionally prone to frequent and long traffic jams, on one of the busiest roads in Bangalore.

I am so dreading the opening of the place and even more of it being even moderately successful. The traffic to this part of the road will increase manifold and we get screwed in the process

Is the sun?
Is the light?
Is the clarity?

Something is wrong with the blog.. The CSS and various javascript files are not being served by the server even though they appear to be present in the themes folder. And since there is no SSH or ftp access to my server, I cannot even check until I return home..

Gaah

WHY do things have to go FUBAR at the last possible moment?

And STFU Murphy!

I’ve been on the Barcamp mailing list and I’ve been following the “post barcamp” discussion. While Barcamp itself was successful, this being the biggest Barcamp ever, in the world; there was discontentment and a longing for improvement in the next iteration of the event (which by the way has been tentatively scheduled for November of this year)

Issues I identified which could have been better or should be next time (This is my opinion and open for discussion)

Main points -

• Too many tracks, too little time. The sheer number of collectives was overwhelming.
• Too many newbies, not enough interaction
• Giving tees on day 2 was a good idea
• Entry fees goes against barcamp philosophy (already agreed upon)

How/what we should change:

Change in facilities -

• Have fewer projectors. Allocate them only who really need it
• Let anyone initiate a discussion. But to make a formal announcement, the initiator needs at least 5 participants(including or excluding the initiator. That’s a no point). Otherwise they can still have the discussion but no formal announcement (via sms)
• In addition to collective charts, have a couple of impromptu talk/discussion charts. Slight conflict with the previous point. Need to resolve that. If we have these, have them in more replications so that participants don’t have to go from one end to the other to check the posters
• Preferably, try to get the rooms/auditorium closer to each other as compared to bcb4

Possible alleviations -

• Don’t prefer to have formal talks by one speaker. Encourage discussions
• But do keep a few slots for formal talks; ‘presentation’ if you want to call it. Call for presentation ppt in advance to filter/approve and pass the presentations and then assign the formal presentation slots. Some might argue that it is against the spirit of barcamp. My opinion is that it’s a barcamp. We can add a limited number of those to mix up types of interaction. There are no formal rules. Let’s define for our convenience
• Noticed that a couple of collectives were trying to be too organized so time management was an issue
• A lot of of talks were talks. And not discussions as it should have been. Demos, prod launches are exceptions
• Educate collective leaders on how to lead more effectively. Encourage more BOFs(birds of a feather)
• Stress on participants that those who are a part of one collective can attend other talks and they don’t necessarily have to sit through all talks to attend just one talk

Lastly, my pics from BCB4 have been uploaded to a Flickr Set.

It’s a bit late but I’ll still give my take on day 2.

Frankly, I was disappointed by Day 2. The sessions started off late as it did on Saturday but that was okay I guess. During the introduction, a lot of speakers came forward to announce what they would be talking about and frankly, I thought that it exceeded the possible time constraints as well as the space constraints. But well if it could happen, good for everyone.

The bloggers collective as expected (by me) had a large number of talks. I was skeptical about accommodating so many talks partly because the collective tended to not fragment into those interested in particular topics and not others (As in, if 2 speakers wanted to talk about different topics at the same time, they could not so that the audience does not get split). I was supposed to give a talk on micro-blogging as well.

However, once the talks started, things started getting messy because the talks would overflow and not all the talks had been alloted a time slot (including mine)  I did listen to a couple of nice talks like moblogging, securing your images from being downloaded. I tried to attend a talk on Semantic web and moving towards an Internet with all data related semantically. But unfortunately I reached late so missed a significant bit of the talk.

The highlight of the day for me was a very nice discussion on bloggers getting a chance to have their posts published in the print medium to reach a wider audience. And another nice discussion with Arun Ram during lunch(it ranged from phone comparisons to egos of popular bloggers, Techcrunch, Robert Scobel etc)

Anyway, overall I felt that day 2 was fairly underwhelming for me.

Ps. The campus at IIM is gorgeous