 All right, so hey folks, thanks for coming today. We are a perfectly sized group. I unfortunately need to stand way over here and use the microphone because recordings. So we've got, I can probably go quickly through this and give you an hour's worth of content in about half an hour. And then we can do a bit of workshopping if you've got content that you are interested in getting feedback on in terms of what that would look like as a conference presentation or a session description or those kinds of things. If folks can just give me a quick show of hands, how many are interested in getting feedback on content that they're interested in presenting? One, two maybe, okay. So what are the reasons that you are here today just to get a better sense of how I can best meet your needs? Everyone's gonna be shy. I know it's gonna be really awkward. Right on, cool. Yep, sure. Yeah, refresh, yeah. Mm, yeah, okay. Sure, yeah. Megan, did you have a, yeah. Sure, okay, right on. So what we're gonna cover today is in three parts and each of these parts has a fairly lengthy but 1500 word essay, article, resource, whatever associated with it. So you are definitely welcome to take notes but I've more or less given you the transcript already on trainingintheopen.com. So if that is something you wanna open up and follow along with and see if there's any extra things that you want me to go over. But this is the three parts. So popular presentation formats, pitching your presentation and preparing for stage success. And then preparing for stage success is more the sort of a timeline of what I go through for topics that I have not presented before. So it's a three month lead into the actual presentation. Whereas topics that I have delivered before, you know it's quite a condensed timeline compared to that. So that's what I'm planning on covering today. And that is what was in the session description. So if there's other things that you're hoping to get out of today, just let me know and I'm pretty sure we can accommodate you. So the first thing we'll jump into is the presentation formats. And for those of you who are presenting at something like a DrupalCon, probably what you will be stuck with, and I'm using my air quotes, is the one hour session conference presentation. And it doesn't need to be this way. We've had some alternate ways of thinking about content delivery in DrupalCon over the past couple of years. And one of the things that I think we should be pushing more within the community is looking at well, how do we actually deliver high value and does it really need to be in those one hour sessions? So on the shorter side of things, and these are almost all formats that I have worked within myself, I've been delivering public speeches since the age of sort of 11, I don't know how old I was at 11, but about 11 years old. And I'm 38 now, so I have a couple of decades experience doing this. At the very short end of the scale, what I was doing in grade school was a four minute rehearsed speech that every single word, if any single word was out of place, then I would lose track and sort of get completely fuddled. And the stuff that I do now is more, not that it's stand up, but I'm much more flexible about what the content is on any given day. So there's a bit of variation from delivery to delivery. So in terms of the shorter format, Ignite and Pechakucha, these are both auto advancing slide techniques. They tend to be more on the humorous side in their delivery because there is an expectation that the speaker and the slides will get out of sync and watching how the speaker deals with that. So they tend to be sort of clustered as maybe five or 10 presentations into a unit of time and you go and watch a bunch of people talk about a bunch of different things, understanding that they're under these constraints. Moderated panel, one of my least favorite formats, but a moderated panel allows you to give a shorter presentation and then potentially to have a group discussion. South by Southwest actually does this really well in that they have, again, sort of like the Pechakucha or the Ignite style, they've got related speakers who are given these short presentations and then they do a moderated Q&A at the end, hit and miss in terms of it just being a panel. I'm not in this presentation, but in previous versions of it, I have a picture of at CMS Expo, I believe it was 13 different content management systems who'd all sent a representative for this panel discussion and it was just, it wasn't useful to anyone. I mean, it was entertaining for the panelists, but it wasn't useful for the audience at all. Interview or fireside chat, I think is a really nice way to get into public speaking if you're not entirely comfortable speaking in front of an audience. And in this format, what you've got are comfortable chairs. I think that's, I personally think that's a key part of it. And you're sat down with someone and your chairs are kind of tilted in and you're more being fed questions by an interviewer, which you're then responding to. So perhaps not slides, but you're able to deliver that content with a very friendly and accessible experience from the stage. In DrupalCon Munich, I think, was the year that Dries did a fireside chat instead of a full keynote. So if you're curious to see how Drupal has done that or the Drupal community has done that, might be worth going back and looking at that one. Product or code demo, we will tend to see these more down on the sales, or sorry, down in the Expo hall. They don't tend to be something that we see as much in the session description or in the session rooms, but they certainly do exist. Sales pitches not allowed from within session rooms. There are sponsored speaking spots though. So we do, you know, we get a little bit of it, but generally speaking, we don't pitch from the stage at a DrupalCon. There are other conferences where this would be exactly what you have to do. And I don't cover pitch decks at all in this one. Finally, on the shorter formats, facilitated discussions are or birds of a feather. If you've seen the, at the top of the escalators, that BOF schedule, which is on the whiteboard, those are anything from a speaker who didn't get accepted, but still wants to deliver their content can sign up for a birds of a feather through to facilitated discussions, or I think there should be a nap buff personally. I think that DrupalCon is a lot of energy. But yeah, like it can be pretty much whatever you need it to be. And then in the longer formats, so this is now at the sort of one hour mark, although, you know, if you don't have an hour of content, then say what you've got to say and wrap up and do a facilitated conversation as part of your session. Webinar, not really gonna happen at a DrupalCon, but they are an interesting and very different way of delivering content. I'm happy to talk about that afterwards if people are interested in it, but I don't think it's as relevant for this audience. Conference keynote, this will be in the range of, for me, probably 100 to 160 hours of prep for a one hour presentation, one hour including Q and A. This is certainly higher pressure and it's probably also content that you have been working with for a while and delivering in various formats or you've been commissioned to deliver that content by the Drupal Association. We generally pay our keynote speakers. I don't know how much, but it's certainly we pay expenses and I assume that there's a small bursary and it's the only paid speaking position within DrupalCon. Tutorials, an hour and a half, 90 minutes, bit of live demo, bit of support, more sort of sage on the stage and tends to be either this style of layout in terms of the, what do we call this layout? This is, I can only think of barracuda and I know that that's absolutely not the right word. It is, goodness. Jam, what is the, when you have singing and dancing from the stage and you've got cabaret, cabaret style, would you say that this is a cabaret style seating? Well, but if we had like circles, circle tables all over the room, like the sprint rooms, is that called cabaret style seating? Something like that, yeah. So the tutorials can be a bit more informal or they can be more sort of classroom style seating where you've got rows of desks leading up. And then of course on Mondays, we also have the workshop formats and those are generally a day long, although sometimes half a day workshops do happen. So within all of those different formats, I have some content that has been almost all, like it's content that has been delivered in all of those different formats. So you start to get to know your content really, really well and how to do shorter version, longer version. It also means like, oh, I'm not set up yet. Well, we'll just start 10 minutes late and I'll adapt a little bit and that'll be fine. So in terms of those presentation formats, you'll need to decide which one is most appropriate for the content that you want to deliver. And ultimately, we need to think about what are the learning outcomes. And that's what I'll talk more about in the pitching your presentation section. Any questions though about any of those presentation formats before, I'm hoping that was all review for everyone and there wasn't anything mind-blowingly new in terms of formats? No questions at this point. Sorry, I'm pausing because I can see people are getting the URLs in pictures. All good? Yep. Sorry, for the recording, is that, Jay, is that mic on? Will Room chatter be picked up by this mic? I don't know how sensitive it is. Okay, thanks. For the record, I've spent a bunch of time in PHP land in the last few years. They're utterly fascinated by us and Drupal 8 right now because we're the first project that really utilizes PHP, FIG and all that stuff. We do not get speakers like Jordy Bojano, the creator of Composer, Davy Shaffik, core developer of PHP and their ilk because we don't pay speakers. And they say, I'm not coming if you don't pay me. And then we have the cheapest tickets in the whole tech world and people are complaining about our prices on our community anyway. How do we resolve this? That's a really good question. I think that the sort of the key piece there is that Jordy, I've met Jordy, he's a really great guy, but he's not part of our community. And he doesn't participate in the Drupal space. So if we want to attract or request that speakers come, then it needs to come with some kind of bursary. And the PHP conferences, I don't know. So having been a speaker at PHP tech, True North PHP, Lone Star PHP, Not World and not any of the framework specific ones, I've never been paid, I've only had my expenses covered. So that is, I think that's a difference and expenses covered, not paid. The reason why it's a difference for me is because as a Canadian, I can't be paid to speak at an American conference without there being a ton of visa paperwork. In fact, excuse me, legally, I can't actually receive a free ticket. I am to pay for my ticket and have it reimbursed. That's just the way the legislation works around speakers who are not American. My problem is huge ambitions to be part of the PHP world. Sure. Sorry, I know it's tentative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just to paraphrase for the recording, the PHP community is not showing up and we do want them to be here and we do want them to be part of the community. How do we do it? We decide to allocate the funds when we pitch in money to make it a different kind of conference. If it is important to us, then we prioritize it and we find the money. And it's one of those like, nah, it's kind of glib and kind of my jerk answer, but it's also how I feel about it, that if it's important, then it gets prioritized. Of the tech conferences that I have run personally, the last one was a few years ago now, but it was 100-mile diet. We did zero waste. There was no, you know, we had cloth table napkins. We had real cutlery. We had, and because I prioritized it, it happened. If it hadn't been important to someone else and certainly many events do not prioritize that, they go for the cheaper ticket because they want to be more inclusive, then that's how it happens. So we have to make the pitch as the community to show how we're going to raise the money to be able to pay those expenses. We're just, just gotta do it, man. Patch is welcome. Any other questions or feedback or suggestions on that topic before I move on? So the pitching, the presentation part, I've broken it down into a few different sort of audiences and things to be aware of, but ultimately I think that when you, I think I get about, maybe I have this as a note on one of my slides. I get about two-thirds of my sessions or two-thirds of the conferences that I submit to except one or more of the sessions that I have put in. So I've been a public speaker in the open source community since 2003. I've written three books now and I do not get every single one of my sessions, like every conference that I apply to, I do not get accepted to. Even the conferences who ask me where the organizer reaches out and asks me to apply, I do not always get accepted into. So this I think is something that is not, like we don't do a very good job of supporting people and giving feedback and explaining that it's not about you, it's about how the rest of the community presented stuff in terms of their session descriptions. I think that's probably big enough to read, but so the first thing when you're thinking about the topics that you want to, and I've got three different audiences here, but the first thing to consider obviously is the conference organizers and you need to satisfy whatever it is that they're looking for. Often there will be a page that describes the theme for that year, some of the topics that they want covered. I rarely submit on the topics. I'm always like, I'm gonna be the weird outlier that talks about empathy at DrupalCon. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, like it's one of those things where I'm constantly submitting proposals and this year I'll be speaking at 17 events, so you gotta be careful, because sometimes you get them all in. But you need to be sufficiently different, but still on target. How do you do that? I, it depends on the conference. Some conference organizers will give you direct feedback before the deadline, some refuse to give feedback because they want to give you a level playing field. There's also now a website called helpmeabstract.com that gives feedback from, I think there's maybe 30 or 40 volunteers now from a range of different backgrounds, mostly within the technical field, mostly PHP, but they give, I am one of the volunteers, we give feedback on those descriptions, but I don't know that the feedback is actually going to help. I'm just suggesting what I would do if it were my topic to present. So that's number one. Second one is you need to convince bosses and ticket payers. So you need to have a clear outcome which justifies the cost of the conference ticket. Generally conferences will know approximately how many attendees they're going to attract, they know approximately how many sessions they're going to have. So you need to do some of that math to figure out my room needs to have 30 people that wouldn't have come to the conference organized in order to be of value to the conference. And that means that I have to be able to convince 30 people to buy a ticket based on whatever session description I'm giving. So there has to be some kind of new technology wow factor or some kind of, and I've got more on this later on, but start to think about why would someone, and super hard for folks who've not been accepted to conferences before, but why would someone pay to see me give this information? If their hourly rate is, I don't know, $20 an hour, what am I going to have to tell them to justify a conference ticket that's gonna take them 30 hours to pay back? What is it that I can give them of value? And then finally on the day of, you need to actually attract attendees into your room. So it needs to be a little bit entertaining. You need to be able to generate a buzz, whether that's with a catchy title, but it can't be too catchy because then people won't understand what it's about. So you've got that balance of sort of pre-conference sales and then day of how do you actually get people in the room? It's maybe not the right approach to take, but I generally try and get people to not be in my room because then I get really high speaker ratings because the people who are there are there because they wanted to be there. So I'm very clear, especially for talks that are maybe not quite the norm in terms of technical confidence, I'm very clear at the very beginning, if you want to leave, you should just get up and go, it's totally fine, I won't be offended, I want to work with the people who are finding this useful. So it's thinking about attracting people and then how do I keep them in that room and keep them engaged? So the way we do this is we need to pitch the problem and your abstract or your session description, those kinds of things, the way that I like to see them is that first paragraph is you effectively list all of the pain points that someone will have on this particular topic. So the pain points when I'm teaching get sessions are, you know, it makes me feel stupid. I don't think that I feel very smart when I use this software. So I don't like using it and I never practice and then I don't know how to do it. So that's like, if this sounds like you, and if you think about sort of infomercials and like the Chamois, Will It Blend, those kinds of super cheesy marketing, they're always talking about the problem first and then the benefit that you're going to experience from buying that product. It's not feature driven in terms of technically speaking, these are the, you know, blah, blah, blah, RPM, something, something for your blender. Like, I don't know what that means. You know, I understand it will blend my iPhone if I'm ridiculous, but you know, like that kind of, what's the benefit of coming in versus feature is very much marketing speak. The next one is to list the learning outcomes and this is more getting into now the features of what people will be able to take away from your presentations. In some ways, learning outcomes are kind of like test driven development in that first you're going to create the test, the testable outcome for the learning experience and then you're going to craft the situation which allows, excuse me, allows attendees to pass that test. Excuse me. So the learning outcome needs to answer the question, what can an attendee do as a result of this session and you need to be able to provide, the attendee needs to be able to provide proof that they have acquired that skill. So if it's not testable, it's not a learning outcome. So here's an example, is it, can folks read that at the back? I'm not sure if it's big enough, is it right? Okay, good. So sample learning outcome, by the end of the session, attendees will be able to and that's your standard line, you know, it's always before the bullet list, whatever variation you want to use. By the end of the session, attendees will be able to use Bloom's taxonomy and create testable learning outcomes for their conference sessions. Now, you don't know, well, maybe some of you, most of you probably don't know what Bloom's taxonomy is. So I know that my presentation needs to include an overview of Bloom's taxonomy, that I need to provide examples of good learning outcomes, so I've done that now, and maybe some examples of bad learning outcomes so that you can compare the difference and you can rate yourself in the future on, does this look like the good one or does this look like the bad one? Kind of simplifying things a little bit, you know, my three minute overview of learning outcomes does not make you an instructional designer, but we'll get close enough, you know, we're not worrying about what the precision is or the accuracy that people will have as a result of taking your session, but it is a testable outcome. So Bloom's taxonomy, blah, blah, blah, history, blah, blah, blah, it is probably one of the easiest systems to use and basically what you do is you pick some verbs from Bloom's taxonomy and match up what you want people to be able to do with an appropriate verb. And I, you probably can't read any of those, not super critical because it's not always the same. So there's lots of variations, there's also a fair amount of critique around it, but I think it's a really great starting point. So this version separates into different kinds of thinkers, so creative thinkers versus reflective thinkers versus independent inquirers, whereas the previous version didn't have that extra layer, they were working off of the pyramid, and I'll show you the pyramid in a second, but the pyramid view with evaluation synthesis, analysis, application, but it doesn't talk about preferred learning or preferred ways of engaging with information, whereas this one does. And it's also been updated, so there's sort of Bloom's taxonomy 2.0 and there's all kinds of made up statistics about how it actually works. This is not a real study, but the graph is wildly available, and what it's implying is that when you give people some basic terminology, they might remember it, but it's not very effective, so remember down at the bottom left and lecture up at the top, apparently it's only 5% accurate. It wasn't actually a scientific study that was done, it was just someone like me making up numbers on the internet, and it's come to carry a lot more significance than what than what Bloom's actually gives you, but it is a nice list of verbs, and it does allow me to think about, well, it does allow me to think about how can I improve this particular piece? So the badness of this is that I can't test that. How do I test if someone knows Bloom's taxonomy or not? So let's see if we can actually improve that. Can folks read any of the verbs that are on there? Okay, fantastic. So if we wanted to fix the broken learning outcome, what could we identify as being broken in the gray text? Can I test it? How would you test it? Survey, okay, and what would your survey have on it? Love it, and what would the question look like? Would it be multiple choice? Would it be fill in the blank? Would it be, what would be the format of that question? Okay, these are all good answers. This is why I'm still picking on you. So it's gonna be a multiple choice, and we need to be able to identify the six different areas. So what will the question be? How will I test it? Oh, but it's multiple choice. Okay, fantastic. So now what I need to be able to do is take a look in here and think about, okay, analysis, remembering. So now I've got some verbs that I can actually use for that particular question because I have got 12, six of which are right, six of which are wrong, so they have to be able to correctly identify. So where would be fine, correctly identify, would be in knowledge, identify, yep. So our learning outcome, based on the question that you've given, so you've written the test. Now what I can do is say by the end of this session, attendees will be able to identify Blooms taxonomy items when given a list of both incorrect and correct options. Now not very sexy as a conference description, but it starts to give you some ideas about how you may want to structure the information or present the information. Once you know, they just need to do a simple multiple choice at the end of this. They don't need to be experts or actually it's going to be a one day workshop. They need to come out with some more skills. So thinking about what the test is and how you would prove that that conference ticket was money well spent, allows you to pick the verbs and then allows you to create some of those learning outcomes which then convince people to buy tickets to the conference. How are people with that information? Do you want to practice another one or is that good for now? Yeah. So in terms of the bullet points, I do everything from on workshop descriptions, learning outcomes, like full learning outcomes in terms of this is what you will be able to do at the end of it. Conference descriptions I tend to go a little bit softer and I don't really expect anyone to be able to do anything by the end of a conference session. I expect them to be entertained. I expect them to be enlightened in terms of some topics to go and look up later. I expect to have some resources prepared that they can reference later on but I've got a really low bar for conference sessions. So that description can be a little bit longer, a little bit shorter. Yeah, it can vary. Other questions on this before we move on? Seeing none. Right. So I think the basic takeaway on this is to think about describing a problem, that sort of marketing speak at the very top, describing that horrible experience of trying to use Git previously and it just made me feel horrible inside and so I never wanted to use it ever again. This session is going to make you feel better. Like what's the marketing speak? We're going to fix this for you and then what can you do or what will you have more confidence to attempt by the end of this particular session? There is a whole thing on writing conference proposals which is already up and available which is more or less what I've already told you today. Bloom's Taxonomy is a great starter though to think about how to just switch the classroom from being me telling you about things to me thinking about how do I want to level you up as part of my presentation? So the last section in this talk is sort of, it's not sort of, it is the sequence of events that I go through when I get ready for a particular presentation generally on a new topic for me, one that I haven't presented on before. So I start with a brainstorming phase and this will last about maybe six weeks, two months and starts about three months out. And this one in this phase I'll be writing down the learning outcomes for the session, choosing the format of the presentation. Is this a workshop? Is this just a half hour presentation? Is it a five minute Ignite talk? And then I'll write the table of contents and the agenda for the presentation. That almost gives me my first draft of the slides because the way that presentation software works, you can actually copy a bullet list and paste it into Keynote and it will make a new slide out of each one of those bullets. I'll write the session description on what I've done to date and then I'll start proposing it to meetups and conferences. So I've played around with the ideas a little bit at this point but I'm mostly just firehosing to whatever currently has an open call for papers to see if it's picked up or not. Apply for every single conference that you think you may have any interest in attending because if you're accepted as a speaker you can always say no, you are not, there's no contractual obligation just because you presented or submitted a session description to actually show up. You can always, they'll email you and say, are you still available to present on these dates? Here's what we're going to offer whether it's a free ticket, whether your expenses will be paid, whatever it happens to be. And if it's a meetup, you'll probably also get to pick the date. So you'll have a lot of flexibility in there. So submit often and get into the habit of saying to the conference organizer, can you give me any feedback on what would have made this a better session description? The next thing that I like, oh yeah, sorry, go ahead. That's a great question. I generally sit down with a thing that I feel that I have witnessed other people being upset about. So I start with that marketing sensation of people are frustrated and unhappy with their experience of X. And so maybe their experience of X is actually not what I'm going to talk about. Maybe I'm going to talk about there's this new technology available that solves this problem but trying to solve it from within that tech is not necessarily the right way to do it. But I like to start with that market research maybe is the right way to say it, or even just with coworkers or whatever it happens to be. This is a problem that people have that I can help them solve. That's not going to work for everyone. Some people are subject matter experts like when Jordy goes and presents things, like he's the composer guy. So he's kind of invested some time into writing some software that we all love. But he wrote it because he saw a problem. So it's still going back to that initial like, why does it hurt? Where does it hurt? How can I solve this for you? Yeah, any other questions on that starting point? And as Megan also mentioned, there's pressure within the community that if you're a subject matter expert, you're expected to start speaking. And so some people have this, I don't think that the pressure is unreal, but there is that pressure of, okay, well, I've done, I've checked off these tick boxes in terms of I'm now a maintainer of this, or I do this technically. So now the next thing I have to do is become a public speaker. What do I have to talk about? And I think that's for me, that would be very anxiety producing to have that pressure of I'm expected to go and sit on a stage and talk about something without having the passion for the topic and really thinking that I can help people with the solution. The next thing I start to do is, come on in and have a seat. The next thing I start doing is writing blog posts about it. And that allows me to start testing the content and seeing if people love the delivery. So I'm a very casual Twitter stats person in the sense of, I'll put a post out there. And if I get 20 favorites or 20 retweets, then I think, you know, it's a solid piece of information that people are interested in. If I get, you know, my get flow chart, it still blows my mind. I made a decision tree as a flow chart for how to undo mistakes and get. The thing has like over a thousand retweets and a thousand favorites. And I just, I just can't believe that it's that popular because it was pretty straightforward to make. Like I drew some arrows and people really liked it. So getting that feedback initially on what people are craving and what they love and what the attention is. I also subscribe to a fair number of newsletters. You know all my secrets now. So content to do with front end web development, with backend web development, with cryptography, with Rails, JavaScript. I've probably got about 10 or 15 newsletters that I subscribe to. So they're pre vetted links. I put them into buffer in Twitter. And if anything, and I generally scan them a little bit, but not, I don't read them very carefully. If it gets a lot of attention on Twitter, a lot of faves or a lot of retweets, I then go back and read it more carefully. So I have, I sort of crowd source. Yeah, yeah. I sort of crowd source what's of interest to people. And that's recorded. So you'll be able to make fun of me later when that recording comes out. But I do, I think it's important to test that content and to see what is of interest to people and how you can change the phrasing of it, how you can better describe the problem, how you can better describe the solution before you actually start thinking about slides. So then the next phase that I go through is the draft phase. And this phase may last a couple of weeks or up to a month. And this will be the first draft of my slides, which in some cases, this is actually written in a markdown file. So it's just a matter of sticking that markdown file into reveal and boom, I have a slide deck. Incorporating comments from the blog posts, maybe I need to add some clarifications or if there's some common misunderstandings that I want to address that wasn't in my original bullet list, then I'll start doing that here. Then I move into the polish phase and this is when I start saying my talk out loud. I hate listening to myself as a recording. So I will fully admit that I'm not great about actually doing this step, but I highly recommend hit the record button on your computer and see if you can get through the presentation from start to finish without stopping to tinker on your slides. And once you can get through a recording, then you know that you've got your storyline down, that the slides actually make sense, that the pacing is right, because often a deck is beautiful as a deck and works really well as a deck, but it doesn't match up to what your story is. I don't write a ton of speaker notes generally, but I do have some where I'm like, oh, it's a big word slide, so I've got things tucked away, but I want to be able to tell a story and I want to know that I can get through it without stopping to get frustrated with my slides. And especially for technical things, this is when I start, if I am doing a live demo, I don't do live demos anymore. I will screencast the demo, put it in the presentation and then play. One of the best examples that I've seen of this was at Lassian camp and he was pretending to type, it was fantastic. It wasn't until we were probably a minute or two into his live demo that we realized that he actually wasn't typing anymore. It was just so seamless and he'd practiced it enough and he would sort of pause while he was typing because clearly he was thinking, while he was telling us what he was typing and then it was like, oh, he's typing with one hand, Wade is typing with no hands. So it doesn't have to look, like you don't have to stand there and watch your screencast. You can practice it to the point where it actually looks like a live demo, but you're not having to worry about all of the extra pieces. And certainly today we had some tech challenges at the very beginning. So the more that you can reduce those tech challenges, the better chance you have on the day of to just be like, I'm here to tell you a story and it's gonna be awesome. And if all of my technology fails, oh well, because I have a story to tell you. I then go through and decrease the amount of text on each slide and add resources and reference links. Where relevant, I'll convert the links into, you know, do the tiny URL step to make links no longer than one line. At this phase I'll also do an accessibility check. I don't really do this a lot anymore because I've got some standard slides, formats that I use, but generally speaking, check your colors. I think I may be able to show you. I've got a thing installed called Color Oracle. I don't know if it'll work on the external monitor. No, it's not. Okay, so what it allows me to do is I've got a couple of buttons that I push and it changes everything on the screen according to three of the more common color blindness schemes. So you don't need to have software that specific. You know, it doesn't have to be a keynote specific thing. It doesn't have to be a web specific thing. You don't have to have a page on the internet. It's just overtop and overlay essentially of your screen. Something's really good. Size, I am breaking my own rule here on the no smaller than one tenth the height of the screen. More small room, it's kind of okay. Where you can really get into trouble is if you have a narrow room that's really deep. So it's the same number of people, but that configuration results in the back of the room not being able to see things. And people love sitting at the back of the room. So the bigger you can get those words and stretched over multiple slides if you need to, the better of chance you've got. The other thing I do, as long as your slides are uploaded ahead of time, just tell people who are winging to download the slides. They're on the internet. They can grab them and read them for themselves as they cycle through. And then, motion, this is one that I've recently had my knuckles wrapped on. Remove all of those animated transitions for folks that have vestibular disorder, I believe is what it's called. So the animations in reveal.js, I hadn't bothered to remove them, but that sort of like fun, sort of big swooping change from slide to slide can make people motion sick. So try to not make people throw up in your presentation. Just gonna suggest that. Now, if you do need to include the animation, give some kind of warning at the beginning of the presentation or right before each of the slides so that at least folks who do have vestibular disorder can brace themselves for that content or look away if they need to, but at least you're giving a warning. And then finally, the humor part, previous versions of this presentation have picked on certain members of our community a little bit more. I will not engage in that as much, but do be aware of humor. One of the things that someone was telling me about this week, they were so excited about a joke they had in their presentation. And they were convinced that I was gonna think, it was hilarious. And it was a reference to Parks and Rec. And I'm like, is that a television show? I don't, I can't, I don't know what this means. So if you have any kind of pop culture reference, it may or may not work. The joke needs to stand alone as good content. And generally speaking, we have very, very low tolerance for any kind of joke that punches down. We are a punch up kind of community. So we want jokes and humor that will lift people up. Self deprecation generally is acceptable. But you know, check your language and make sure that the joke tested on people. We're not professional comedians, we're professional Drupalists. So let's keep our content in that area. Finally, I go through my practice phase and this is, again, screencasting the practice sessions. Now you've got a good recording of it. So if everything goes belly up on the day of your presentation, it's okay. You've got a recording. You can just post that on the internet instead. If you go back as well at this point and double check the description of the session, you may have made so many tweaks that you're not actually delivering on your promise anymore. At this point, we're probably one or two weeks out from the conference. It's too late to change any of the printed things. So just make sure your beginning slides offer some kind of diff, essentially, in terms of saying, I know I promised you this, but based on feedback, I've realized that these are the key points that are missing out. And so if you were expecting something that was not here, it's not here. Here's a couple of URLs. You can go read about it on the internet. This is what we're going to focus, and these are the reasons why I'm going to focus on that. Finally, pack your day bag and make sure that all your stuff fits in. I recently got a slightly larger computer and it didn't fit into my day bag. Glad I noticed that a week before a conference and not as I was headed out the door. So pack everything, make sure it's all going to fit and fit in a way that you can pack it in a rush. You don't want your zipper breaking. You don't want any of that kind of stuff. And this is the bag that I use on conference day. So it doesn't look like a full-on, I just feel safer. It doesn't look like I'm carrying around a computer with me. And I had one that was slightly smaller and it didn't fit the new MacBook Airs. So pack things up, make sure they all fit. And then we move into our pre-conference phase and we'll do one more final run through the presentation, remind your surfboarders to show up, give them the right room number, unlike what I did today. Sorry guys. Simplify the speaker notes so that you can actually read them and refer to them. Print your speaker notes. This is a pretty good trick that I've seen some folks do. So if everything goes wrong, there's no internet, there's no projector, your computer dies and your backup doesn't work. You at least have the capacity to tell the story using the notes in front of you. Get a good night's sleep before you go to the conference because ultimately once you get to the conference you won't be in your own bed, you probably won't sleep as well. Final preparations, assuming a multi-day conference. Day before, go to the room you'll be presenting in, introduce yourself to the AV team. You may, if you were in a little bit earlier, you may have noticed that they know me, they know that my stuff always breaks, but DrupalCon has the same AV staff and they come to each of our different conferences. So for me, I know that Joe and Scott are gonna fix things. I don't need to worry if stuff doesn't work when it first gets plugged in. They're calm, they're soothing, they're amazing. I love working with them. So if you can, the day before, go and introduce yourself, it will make them absolutely delighted that you even thought to think of them as people. It doesn't always happen. Tech check, drink lots of water, upload your slides. If you're an introvert, avoid the conference the day before you speak. Make sure that you're good and charged up for your next day at the conference. There is of course a strong fear of missing out, but if you need that quiet time to be comfortable on stage, make sure that you get that quiet time so that you can be comfortable on stage. Night before, pack your bag with all the things. That last item, the clean shirt and trousers. I haven't often spilled things on me, but there's definitely been times when I thought, oh, this is a little bit tragic. I do have a podium in front of me, so you can't see that I may or may not have stains on my shirt, you'll have to check later. But you may want to think about what happens if I do spill coffee down my front. Do you wanna wear dark colors instead, for example, of wearing a bright shirt? Make sure your laptop's fully charged, you know, the basic things. Reality check, you're probably not gonna sleep a lot if you don't do a lot of presentations. Don't worry about it. Get as much sleep as you can, but don't be thinking, oh my goodness, it's going to be horrible tomorrow because I haven't slept. No, you're gonna be amazing and you're gonna be completely full of adrenaline, so get the rest you can the day before. Morning of, try to eat breakfast, try to hydrate with water again. You can hear that my mouth is starting to stick and it's making snapping noises. That's because I'm dehydrated. Smile a lot, you can often trick your body into thinking something will be more fun by doing that smiling. Half an hour before, make sure you do a final pee and then go to your room. It's true though, because especially at an event like this, you're gonna get stuck in the hallway, people are gonna wanna chat, and you'll be like, oh, I don't have time now. No, go pee, just make sure you do that. Literally the last few minutes of the presentation, as soon as you can get on stage, as soon as you can get plugged in, get up there. And if that means kicking out the previous speaker, you're actually doing them a favor because they want offstage as much as you want onstage. So help to shepherd people away from the front of the room and hopefully the person who comes in behind you provides that support. Look over, make sure that they haven't forgotten anything, ask them if that was their water bottle, but basically help them to get offstage and get yourself set up. During the presentation, let people know how you would like to deal with questions. So I'm with a small group, especially like this, I can actually see all of you. I don't have big spotlights in my eyes. I'm happy to take questions as we go through the presentation. I would say generally, if you're a new speaker or it's a brand new presentation, it's gonna be harder to pace yourself if you're getting interrupted. So ask people to hold their questions to the end. You may have noticed that I'm skipping, not in a negative way, but we talked about other things, mid-presentation, and now I'm able to or being forced to adapt on some of this content, so I'm going quickly over that. As you get more comfortable with the content, you'll be able to navigate the experience a little better, but taking questions mid-presentation does derail you. I wrote a whole thing on tips for audience management. If you do want more information about that, maybe review it a couple of weeks before you present. It's not anything that should prevent you from submitting session descriptions. Quick summary, and I'll have that you're all up again in a second. Choose a format that works best for you and your goals. If you want to make a developer out of someone, a one-hour conference presentation is not gonna do it. You're gonna want at least a day, maybe a couple of days. So think about what you want to accomplish and choose the right format. Excuse me, pitch your presentation with your audience in mind. So we had the three audiences, we had the conference organizer, we had the ticket payer, and then we had the attendees during the conference. Include the outcomes in your presentation proposal, so we did a little bit of work around Bloom's taxonomy, which I think will be useful for those of you who are putting together session descriptions, and then ultimately plan to work in your presentation for about three months. And a little bit every week for three months is going to get you way further ahead than trying to cram 40 hours or 20 hours into your last week when you're not really sure what to do and you're not, you know, what about my, are my slides good enough? I have more content, I don't know what to do. Start way earlier, if possible. Play with the content, play with the ideas, and then start to refine what the story is that you're going to tell on the day of. For some resources, I honestly can't remember if I've actually managed to get the slides uploaded or not, but all of the articles are uploaded and there's not content in those slides that aren't in the articles. So the, if you really want the headings only, then I'll make sure I'll get those slides uploaded, but I think the blog posts or the articles will be of a lot more use to you. I think that's the last one. Ta-da, thanks everyone. I know we're at time at this point, but I also am very happy to stick around and answer questions, but we'll cut the recording at this point. So you're able to head out to your next session. Thanks very much for attending.