 Hi everyone. Thanks to coming to the first speaker check-in for Drupalcon Portland. I am massively excited to be helping you through this process and I will probably use Canadian pronunciations on things. Yes, that's process not process. And this is a thing that we've been working on for a couple of years now. The first Drupalcon quote-unquote training for speakers was actually in Washington DC, which was a number of years ago now. And basically it's just a way to support you as a speaker in getting ready for Drupalcon. I've been doing this for a number of years, but I'm in no means a professional speaker getting $10,000 a speaking gig. I get a free ticket to Drupalcon just like you. But one of the things that I do have is experience presenting at Drupalcon specifically and some of the cultural background expectations that you may not be familiar with if you're new to Drupalcon. Like I've said on this intro slide, if you can hop into Pound Drupalcon on FreeNode in IRC, that's where we will be having the questions and sort of general back channel stuff. I will be monitoring it and we'll try not to burst out laughing if you say ridiculous things in it. However, that's the space where you can do it. Most of you will be muted at this point. If not everyone, there's a couple of people that I've not been able to click the button for. So let's jump in and take a look at what we're going to be doing today. So this is our agenda. We're going to be doing some brief introductions. You'll be doing your introductions in IRC. So you'll have a conversation that's happening while I'm essentially talking and you'll be talking at the same time. I'll let you know a bit about who I am. Then we'll move on to the rationale for the speaker check-ins, why we do it. Next up, we'll move into the expectations for presenters. Then we'll talk about the next steps for you as a presenter, including some of the deadlines that you have. In total, I am expecting this to take probably 20 minutes, but then we'll spill over into questions and we'll get talking and it will take a little bit longer, of course, but this is really just a quick check-in to get you started thinking about this whole DrupalCon thing that's coming up in, I think we're at eight and a half weeks from the conference itself. So as I give my introduction, as I said, go ahead in IRC and introduce yourself. I can see that some of you have already started doing that, which is excellent. So hi everyone, I'm Emma. I'm probably best known for having knit the Drupal socks back in 2008. They were a gift for a friend of mine, James Walker. Since then, I have gained more notoriety in the Drupal community for having written Frontend Drupal, which was a seeming book for Drupal 6. For Drupal 7, I wrote a user guide and have also just wrapped up videoing some screencasts for Pearson to go with my second book. So I'm more of an education person and spend a lot of my time on stage rather than in development. One of the things I love about doing the speaker check-in is I am a complete presentation nerd. I love talking about presentations and storylines and how to fit things together in ways that probably border on unhealthy in terms of how exciting I find it. But then there's other people who find their topic just as exciting. So we'll just, we'll benefit from each other's level of excitement on this one. So I'm going to give you, we're at 11.05 local time for me. I'm going to give you another three minutes in IRC to go ahead and introduce yourselves and just get a hang of this format because it is our first time together as well. So I'll sort of quiet down here for a couple of minutes and participate over in IRC. If you're watching the recording, you'll be able to skip ahead and you'll know it's time to tune back in when the slide changes. Okay. So I've got one question coming in via email and so some folks are new to IRC, which is great. And I think you'll be able to hear me as I walk you through this. If we go to Drupal.org slash and I believe it's IRC. Yeah. Here's the instructions that we'll need here. So I'm just going to put it as text onto the top of this slide. My font color. No, it's not going to work. If I make that red, can you see Drupal.org slash IRC and that will have the instructions on how to get connected to IRC and then the channel that you want to be logged into. So you're going to be logging into FreeNode and then the channel itself is PoundDrupalCon or hash depending on what your region is. So number sign, DrupalCon, all one word is the IRC channel. Let me know in either the WebExChat or email or Skype or whatever it happens to be that you have been able to get into IRC if you couldn't previously. And I'll scan the names as well just to see that people have gotten in who've pinged me directly. All right. So I think everyone is sort of tumbling into IRC now, which is fantastic. I'm seeing a few folks who weren't quite sure where they were supposed to connect now showing up in IRC. Again, send me an email if you are still having problems with it. And this session is kind of about getting sorted out and figured out. So it's okay. Don't feel that you're wasting anyone's time or anything like that. That's what this is all about is getting immersed in the culture of Drupal as you prepare for DrupalCon. And move on to the next slide. Here we go. So the whole point of this is for the conference to actually support you in the preparation of your presentation. And one of the things that we've refined over the years is making sure that you get information about who you're going to be presenting to and what is to be expected if you're presenting at a very large conference for the first time. I think most people who are now accepted to DrupalCon as a speaker do have speaking experience. Can you let me know in either IRC or the WebEx chat if you've never spoken at a conference before? My guess is that most of you do have speaking experience, though. Right. So I would consider local need-ups to be an equivalent. So you've done a little bit of speaking in front of an audience, at least. The third session that we do is going to be on what actually happens in terms of the audience. And just to prepare you, we are breaking records with ticket sales for this conference. We've already sold over 1,000 tickets to this conference, and probably the biggest audience that I have presented to at a DrupalCon had about 600 people in the room. This scares a lot of people, but I'd like to think of it as just being really, really efficient because there's a lot of people who want your message, and they're just all showing up at the same place at the same time. So instead of you having to stay on there and say the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, this is just super supportive audience. If they heckle, it's because they love you, not because they hate you. It'll be easier than working in a Drupal issue queue. It's going to be a lot of fun, and it's just about efficiency in terms of getting that message out. And ultimately, it's a little bit scary, but I want to help you with that nerve factor. And I've been doing this for... I've been doing it for a long time. I've been doing public speaking stuff for over 20 years. So we are absolutely here to support you. If you have a lot of presentation experience, we are not trying to suggest that we know more than you about public speaking, but we do want to help you in delivering the best possible presentation for your particular style and our DrupalCon audience. And we also respect that there are different kinds of styles of giving presentations. We don't think that there needs to be a cookie cutter approach to what happens on stage, but we do think that there are a number of things that make for a good presentation. We do expect from you a lot of effort. And this is maybe a new expectation if you haven't done a big conference before. And by a lot of effort, I mean a little bit every week between now and the conference. We expect... And this is... This can be a tricky one in terms of knowing who the audience is and understanding that it's an international audience. But we expect our speakers to respect the audience who shows up and also the audience online who will be watching the recording later on. So one of the things that I have definitely evolved as a speaker over time is my sense of humor. And what I think is funny for on-stage presentations is not nearly as craft as what it used to be. And a lot of that is because of that online, the recording, and people watching things later on. I want everyone to feel like they were a part of what was happening. And I don't want people to feel excluded because of a joke that I had with an audience that was a private joke. I want it to be public fun when I get up there and give a presentation. In terms of the time commitment, I think that for my best presentations, I will have spent, on average, at least 40, 40 hours preparing that presentation. For you, this means five hours a week between now and Drupalcon. And that doesn't mean five hours in front of a computer. That could be 20 minutes every day in the shower, gives you an hour or more. Or I'm not very good at doing shower math. It depends on how many days a week you shower, I guess. But the point is that you're spending time consistently, thinking about what the story is that you're going to deliver on stage. You're not leaving it all to the last minute and throwing together some slides. Part of your time spent preparing includes showing up today. So you get to tick off some time today for having shown up. The next expectation that we have is that we want to see progress as you get closer to Drupalcon. So we don't expect to see, you don't have to turn in homework, but we are going to check with you and ask to talk about your outline, ask to talk about your slide deck and how it's coming along. And this isn't because we don't trust you. We do trust you. But we also want you to succeed and we want to be able to help you as soon as possible, instead of it being how many presenters do we have, probably 100, maybe more, all needing help in the very last moment. We want that help to be spread out over time. We also expect you to ask questions. And that includes asking questions to one another in IRC. It also includes asking questions to your track chairs about the content. And it could also include asking questions to me about the style of presentations, the expectations. So how many people have I made a little bit nervous about what's expected of them? Again, just throw into IRC. So we've got one hand up and I don't want to scare you, but I just want to give you a true look at what goes into an amazing presentation. And it's a little bit of time consistently between now and Drupalcon. We've had eight weeks. That's a long time. Webinars scare me more. Well, we've already had the postman show up and the cat fall off the bookshelf. So all the disasters are happening here. Okay, and some people are saying it's pretty much on par of what you were expecting, which is great. Alright, let's move on to the next bit. In my opinion, and this is something that is highly, highly controversial. I personally think that great presentations have four parts to them. And a lot of times people think, Oh, I need to put together a presentation. Therefore, I'll open up keynote or I'll open up PowerPoint or open up a slide deck presentation. And I think that the slides are they're not they're not the primary focus. It's where we tend to start because it's easy to open up software. I mean, we are software people presenting at a software conference. But I think that really there's four parts that need to be considered. First of all, the context. How does your story fit into the Drupal experience? And usually that's pretty obvious from the title and the session description. But it's something that we don't always remember to tell people during our presentations. So one of the things that I do as part of the context part of my presentation is I say to people, this is a beginner talk, if you're an advanced person, you may as well leave now go find another session to be part of or go hang out in the hallway track. I want to make sure that the audience knows right up front that this is going to be the perfect presentation for them to be in. Next is the content piece. And the content piece is usually where we spend all of our time. It's proof of a new module that we've written. It's the the stats from or the data from the business case study that we put together. The mistake that we make, though, is that we try to educate people in our content. You've got an hour at best during your conference presentation. You don't have a day. Then the person is going to walk out of your session and they're going to walk into another session and then another one and then another one and then another one. And I got to tell you by the end of the week, they're not going to remember what you said. So stop trying to educate people, inspire them and inform them. Think of your presentation as edutainment, but don't try to educate them. I just I think that this is one of the biggest mistakes that we can make. Having a conclusion with takeaway lessons is going to help lock in any messages that you wanted people to take away from your presentation. At most, three takeaway lessons. At most, that's like if you're super lucky, if you're presenting on Tuesday at, you know, the time slot after the keynote, and then you expect someone the following Monday to remember what you've said. Good luck with that. Three things. So you get to put three fingers in the air or have three main post-it notes and work to those. And then finally, and I'm going to take questions just after I'm done this next one. Finally, it's the action. And this one I think is on the controversy list. And action, I think creates a bond with the audience by asking something of them. So you're saying to your audience, I would like you to do what I would like you to take a look at the issue queue for this particular problem. I would like you to install and try this module. I would like you to what do you want people to do? Make a contract with them and make them accountable to you have some way of communicating with them beyond the initial experience of your presentation. And that accountability, I think is what makes us memorable as on stage presenters. So I'm just going to pause a bit and go through these questions that I've had. So comments here, I was always nervous presenting. Yeah, it's I started presenting when I was 10 or 11, I think. And I got to the point where one day I realized, I don't need to be nervous. These people are here because they want to listen to me. And I just need to tell them my story. So for me, it was definitely a process getting comfortable on stage. And there was a click moment for me. But it's it is a process and it takes practice, just like becoming a good module developer takes practice, presenting on stage takes practice. Alright, scrolling down through the rest of the questions, how to prepare to be relaxed when presenting, I am going to spend a whole session on this. So I'm definitely don't think that I'm not giving you the tips and tricks this time. But a lot of it has to do with centering myself, realizing that people are in that room, because they care about the message. They're there to support me. They're not there to make fun of me or heckle me unless you're in core conversations. And that's a totally different beast. I'm mostly joking. But yeah, they they're not that audience is there because they want to listen to what you have to say. And where you would talk to them one on one without feeling really nervous about it, you're just doing that efficiently. Okay, um, there's some great video examples on getting presentations, absolutely. And I'll have more of those in subsequent presentations. And scrolling down will these slides be available on slide share? Yep, no problem. I'll upload them. There's a total of five or six slides, I think there's really not that much. And the next question, the bit about not educating. So the mistake that we often fall into is that we try to teach module development in an hour, or we try to teach, teach something as if the person is going to walk out of the room able to complete the steps that we've covered, they're not going to be able to do that they're going to be overwhelmed being at a conference. So you can inform them, you can inspire them, and you can provide an educational exposure or experience, but don't try to do a live demo and expect people to follow along, it's just not going to happen in an hour. And in fact, I'll rage out on live demos later on. I there is no love in my heart for live demos at a triple con, it's just not the place for it. And again, with the exception of core conversations. And examples of calls to action, I think I've already given some of those. So in the chat window, what I'm going to have people do is based on their topic. Can you think of a call to action that will be relevant for you. So I'm presenting at triple con on giving and getting good feedback in terms of critiques and software reviews. This, this a good takeaway action for this would be to ask or revise in the issue queue. So if you've already been doing code critiques, ask or revise a an ask you've already done using the guidelines that I give during the presentation. Someone's actually submitted for core conversations as well. And yeah, core conversations, it's, it's the purpose of that track is completely different from the main track. Alright, scrolling down again, never log into IRC when you're on stage. Yes, turn off all notifications, all notifications. And where is a good place for a live demo, a camp. So a local meetup. There, I generally speaking, the smaller the audience, the easier it is to have a conversation with them about the live demo that you're doing. I personally don't like live demos. But there are instances when it's appropriate. I would rather see a recording of like a screen cast of those same steps. And then you can post that recording of the screen cast later on. How do I feel about audience participation? Define audience participation, please. Asking for interactions during the session E part. So do you mean asking them to ask you questions? Or asking them to follow along in terms of doing code or? Yes, so. And again, this has to do with how many people are in your room. If you've got 600 people in the room, you don't want them all asking you questions. But you could definitely do a poll in terms of like how many people here have written a theme before? Put up your hands. How many people here have never been to Drupalcon before? Put up your hands. How many people, that kind of thing. And the other thing that you may want to do though, is ask how many people here are checking email? How many people here have found a power outlet, and they're just hanging out for the session. You'll get, you'll get a mix of different people. How much time to leave for Q&A depends on your session topic. And it also depends on your presentation style. So if you're going to do the equivalent of a 20 minute TED talk, and then you want to open it up for Q&A, you obviously have more time for Q&A. TED being the short form for technology entertainment design, I think it is the shortcut at ted.com, where all speakers are limited to 20 minutes. I'm going to go on to the next bit here, which is essentially us now wrapping up. So if you need to head out early, we're two slides away from the end. Getting more help, there is a speaker resources page, portland2013.drupal.org slash speakers slash resources. And if you're listening to the recording, you already know where that page is. I've also given us four different book titles. Excuse me. These are not required reading. But if you're a presentation nerd, and you don't already know about these books, you may want to check them out. The first one is beyond bullet points. And this one is actually, oops, this one is actually, it's a PowerPoint book, but it's remarkably good. It talks about how to break your talk down using Post-it notes, and think about the structure, the story arc, and a lot of things that I wouldn't really expect from a PowerPoint book. Now the second half of the book is the technical ins and outs of how to use PowerPoint. It's less useful if you're using keynote or open office or Libra office. But the, like I said, the first half of it on how to structure your content is platform agnostic. It doesn't care what software you're using. The next two books are both by, and I may get her last name wrong, but Nancy Duart, Slideology and Resonate. These ones, the first one is similar to Beyond Bullet Points. The second one is more about crafting a story. It's not about the structure of the software at all. It's more about how do you put together a compelling story that will resonate with people. The fourth one on the list, Presentations N, is, again, more like Slideology and Beyond Bullet Points, but it's not a software focused book, more a story focused book. In IRC, can you drop in any additional resources that you've really enjoyed referring to or using as someone who's gotten ready for presentations before? And I'll say them back into, as I remove my cat from the desk, there we go. And as I'll say them back into the recording as well. Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Birkin, Confessions of a Public Speaker for five things every presenter needs to know about. Presentation patterns. I, you know, I didn't love presentation patterns. I had very, very, very high hopes for it though. If I'd lowered my expectations, I think I would have enjoyed it more. But presentation patterns, Neil Ford. Yep, helpful kitty is helpful. Okay, I will paste up these extra resources as part of the slide deck when I do post the slides. And then they'll also be in the recording. So the very last thing that we've got are the important dates that you need to be aware of as speakers. You'll have two different styles of check-ins. One will be with your track chairs, and then one will be with me. The speaker check-ins are more sort of all mass. Everyone gets together at the same time and blows into a paper bag, drinks and whiskey, whatever it is that we need to do to get ready as presenters. And I'm also really happy to review your slide decks because I really like doing that. And I realize that's kind of weird and a little bit voyeuristic of me, but I just I really like doing it. So if you want to share your slides with me ahead of time, I'd love to review them. And these dates are March 22nd, which comes up first. It is your session review with your track chair where you go over the description of your session and basically say yes, this session still makes sense, considering all of the changes that have happened in Drupal. So, you know, sometimes module land changes, right? This session review with your track chair just ensures that your session still makes sense. The next one, and Lorna is saying you are a presentation geek to me. It's true I am total nerd. The next one, April 19th. This is the outline and slide review. So by month from now, yes, well, five weeks from now, we expect you to have a draft of your outline and or your slide deck. We don't expect perfection. At this point, we just expect you to have some idea of how you're going to be spending your time on stage. Then the next check-in there are there is another track chair check-in, but the next check-in after that is going to be with me and we'll be going over presentation style and deck tips and tricks, which is actually a bit of a tongue twister. And in the deck tips and tricks and presentation style, we'll talk about some of the different ways to present your information. I happen to be using the Drupal con slide background for this talk that is not required for you. And in fact, that's like I love the logo, but I don't think that you should have distractors on your slides. And I already took out the slide number and date and the tag line for the conference. So feel free to decorate things as little as possible and focus on your message. So again, that's going to be the April 25th check-in where I rage out about slides and tell you more about different presentation styles that I think can be highly effective for different comfort levels, personality types, and there's going to be some sample slides in there as well of things that I think are well done. The video from Munich is already up if you want to get a sneak peek of what happened in the last speaker check-in for this topic. The times for the live meetings will always be at the same time. If you're not available, you can watch the recording later on. As I've said, the check-ins are pretty much the same from conference to conference. So you can go back and watch the Munich slides or sorry, watch the Munich recordings and you just go to Munich 2012.druple.org and look at the speaker resources page. Those recordings are already there if you'd like to skip ahead and watch the stuff and then see how closely I can follow the same presentation outline, which you'll see I never do. That's my last slide for today. So you can drop me an email or stuff with the association and email and let us know was that the right information? Was it too long, too short? What else do you want to know about? And I can make sure that it's in the next. Either speaker check-ins with me or something that your track chair can follow up with. So that's all that I have. We are at 22 the hour. I'm happy to stick around at least for 20 minutes, but those of you who are used to IRC, I think you'll find that I'm pretty much around a lot and you can ping me whenever you want. I will get back to you as soon as I can. I'm not always around. Sometimes I just leave IRC on. So do drop me an email to guarantee yourself a response. And thanks so much, everyone, for showing up today. I know everyone is super busy and you're super awesome, which is why you were accepted for DrupalCon. Go you. And I'm really looking forward to working with you more. I will answer the questions that have come up in IRC into the audio just so that people who are watching the recording get a sense of what happened and why they should come next time. Okay. So Seth asked, could you go through my normal creative process or workflow from a more tactical standpoint? Or do I start in Kino? Oh, never start in software. No way. Because then you completely limit yourself to what the software is going to do. So there are about a million different ways to start a presentation. And you have already started your presentation because you wrote an outline that was accepted. So whether you realize it or not, you are well into the creative process of writing your presentation because you've already submitted something. Like you're not actually starting from zero. So where I am at this point is probably the safest way to say it. I don't have a webcam set up so I can't show you this. I don't know if you can hear this. I have just opened a drawer and in this drawer I have a whole bunch of index cards. And on these index cards are things that I've been thinking about which I think need to go into my presentation. So some of these things include attention must be paid from death of a salesman. Take it personally if they don't criticize from Mandy Patinkin on Q which is a Canadian radio show from March 6th. What else have I gotten here? Ambiguity. You always have the choice on how you want to hear something. So I just collect things that I think are important messages that either I want to recreate the experience that I had when I first heard it or I want to quote-unquote teach people about or inform people of. I also have a bitly bucket I think is what it's called which Lorna first introduced me to and I collect URLs that are relevant to my presentation. So instead of having a bookmark thing either in like delicious or pin board or one of those kinds of things. Thanks Lorna. Yes bitly bundles and so what that does is it gives me a collection of URLs that I can then share with the audience and I may prune it back. I may take out some of those resources but at this point I'm just hoarding all the information. And then the next sort of pass through is I think about if I go back in these slides. I go back here and I think about the end of my presentation and this is very much like the way I would prepare curriculum for students. I want to know what people should be able to do at the end of this presentation. I want to know what my action items are. I want to know what the takeaway messages are and I figure that out first. Once I know what the conclusion is I can work backwards in the presentation to figure out how to get them to that point and some of my tools include working in slides and just because it's easy to drag things around. I will often throw out the first version of my slide deck so I do some thinking in the software, post-it notes, beyond bullet points has some templates that I print out as well that just involves a lot of brain time paired up with what are the conclusions wrong tool, what are the conclusions and actions that I want people to take away and do as a result of my time on stage. And I do see it as a privilege to have this time on stage and I want to make sure that it's not just about me getting up there and raging or ranting or pontificating or I want people to feel that it was time well spent, that they don't regret having missed someone else's presentation for having spent the time with me. Which I guess is a really short way of saying I don't know just do stuff. Sorry Seth. Don't spend time trying to teach yourself a new tool just because someone else uses it. So if you love Omni Outliner, have at it with Omni Outliner. If you love post-it notes, have at it with post-it notes. Yeah for the index cards I use them just to track information in a format that's easy to manipulate. So I don't use the index cards during the presentation, they're just little snippets of time, little snippets of ideas that I hoard to begin with and that I lay them out on a table. I don't trust digital in a lot of ways, I just find that it loses things, I can't see everything at once, so I track things on paper to start. And I find that index cards, post-it notes are, they're easily shuffled, they're easily sorted. If I delete them they're still there, that kind of thing. Any other questions? Not sure how to touch base with the track chair, the sessions. Yes, your track chairs will be getting in touch with you. Seth, the number of slides will totally depend on your style of presenting. So today I have spent 45 minutes on nine slides. I've had other presentations where an hour has been over 120 slides, it just depends on what the style is that you're going for. I will be very disappointed though if you use the templates to their full extent and have three levels of headings on your slides that will make me cry inside. Again we'll talk more about decks in the next session. Thinking about how to replicate that. What is that referring to? Index cards, yes. So in terms of online stuff and session sharing and how to prepare together, I would recommend putting together your own index cards and working on your own slice, but perhaps also taking a look at card sorting tools that are available for UX in terms of online, if you actually want physical cards replicated online, doing a google search for usability testing card sorting tools will probably find you something equivalent rather than a linear document like google doc for a shared script because the script you'll do closer to laugh. And a google doc is really difficult because it's linear and I personally am on board with you. I find it very difficult to see what's happening when I work in a linear document that scrolls off the screen, but you know everyone's different right? I'm very visual and tactile. I use fountain pens. Again see also nerd. We are rambling now folks and you don't need to stick around if you're waiting for some juicy thing for me to say it's not going to happen. So feel free to log out and meet us over in IRC. I think I've still got a few folks that I need to help out with IRC. Can you send me a quick email and I'll hop on Skype with you one-on-one and get IRC figured out. But just like I said drop me a quick email and let me know if you're still having a problem with that. I'm going to wrap up the recording now though because like I said I'm mostly just rambling at this point and I really look forward to seeing you at the next speaker check-in which let me just flip to that date and I'll make crazy marks is on April 25th and you'll be hearing from your track chair between now and then. So thanks everyone I'm still looking forward to working with you as we get ready for triple con Portland. Yay! Bye-bye.