About being disruptive
7 comments so far
Boring endless presentations. This is what modern conferences are all about.
This trend needs to be stopped as soon as possible. As more people put their hands on Powerpoint/Keynote/Impress and so forth, more bullet pointLESS productions arise.
If you attend regular conferences and maybe you paid to participate I think that this is the ultimate masochistic practice you can experience on yourself.
On the other hand, if you attend unconferences you have a chance to set yourself free from boredom and control.
Just raise your hand and try to be as disruptive as possible. If the host tries to keep the concentration on his bullet pointLESS presentation just tell him that it’s now time for discussion and that you already got the point.
It looks like we got to a point where barCamps and unconferences are now the most wanted stages for I-need-to-feed-my-ego type of speakers who have been rejected from regular conferences and now try to pitch their services in our beloved open settings.
Well if you attended a Camp recently or will in the future, I suggest you step up and stop the dictator of the session. You can also say that Julius from the EMBlog told you to.
You really need to get in another mindset when at unconferences or Camps. Speak up. Listen. Participate. Share. If you feel others are not doing that, just let the organizers know or tell the host because you don’t realize that you’ve been thrown ten years back in the past.
Thanks @audio for putting together MediaCampBucks, it was great.
Update: Well it looks like me and Seth Godin agreed this morning about bullet points… have a look at his latest post.
Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under BarCamp, Event Planning 2.0, my favourite posts, open source, psychology of events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Thanks for that, was good to meet you.
Hope to see you at the London event:
http://mediacamplondon.pbwiki.com
I agree 100% Julius, i guess slide presentation need to be no more than 7-10 minutes, and max other 3-5 minutes for focusing topic from relators, and then a nice discussion session.
See petcha kuthca format about slide session (20-30 slide, max 20 second per slide).
I suggest this event : Sci(Bzaar)net hybrid format between petcha kutcha and barcamp
in Milan 17 May.
http://lo-ad.it/index.php/news/138
best regards Walter
@Chris I’ll do my best to be there as well
@Walter I’ll definitely have a look
Totally agree, and why I sometimes struggle to create presentations.
Really, I just want to run through my experience, successes and failures fairly quickly, and move onto conversing with the other people in the room about what they really want to know/talk about.
Although it does depend somewhat on the purpose of the event. MeasurementCamp, for example, had some gentle steering of the sessions, in order to lead to a definite outcome - which is definitely needed for that type of event.
[...] is an events manager who says disrupt boring conferences. We promise not to be [...]
Sure PowerPoint is evil. Sure top-down is non crowd-sourcing. Sure podiums are the new pulpits. Sure presenters are autocrats but let’s leave room for storytelling as well as conversation. Sometimes listening is participative and interactive too.
I completely agree. I love storytelling and being engaged in such emotional ways. My objective is discrediting those who take advantage of the availability of our listening to pitch, or promote things we do not really care about.
Thanks for coming up with that point, it was missing from the post.