Re: PGCon 2008 RFP

On Mon, 29 Dec 2008, Dan Langille wrote:

> If we have enough volunteers: speakers will be accosted in the lecture
> hall just before their talk. The attacker will have a USB drive and
> will not let the presenter speak until they supply a copy of the slides.

I think some speakers might be uncomfortable with their slides going out
to the world at large before they've even presented them. People pay more
attention to the talk if they haven't seen the slides beforehand, and
there's plenty of amusing speakers you wouldn't want to ruin the live
presentation of that way. Being accosted by random people can be
disconcerting as well.

What might make sense is to have an official list of organizer deputies
authorized to collect a copy of the slides as part of the setup/teardown
of each talk. If the presenter knew that giving a copy to someone on that
list relieved them of needing to submit them later (and made for easy
deflection of individual requests), and that the slides would be posted
promptly just after the presentation itself (but not before), I think that
could play out well on both sides.

I would volunteer to fill that role for any talk I attend. Unless you do
something crazy that would ruin my chances of coming at all, like
requiring standardized slides without providing a LaTeX template.
(Robert mentioned OSCON: they provide templates in
PowerPoint/Keynote/HTML format to aid presenters, but they do not require
their use)

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD