 Fantastic. All right. So today we're going to go through the last few things that you need to do in the week and a half before DrupalCon. Very exciting. We're getting very close to the end now. This presentation covers a number of different things. If you are needing to head out, the most important things you to stick around for is the room set up. Let's just use this one here is the room set up. I've got it at the very beginning and then the remainder of the presentation is for perhaps new and perhaps for experienced speakers. I'm going to use some of my tips and tricks on dealing with nerves dealing with technical failure and also some audience management techniques in terms of doesn't happen very often but dealing with trolls and other fun kinds of audience members. We've just got an update that's happening which stuff is doing for us over in the speaker FAQ section. So I'm kind of monitoring that as we go along. The room set up for this conference is very similar to what we've had at previous DrupalCon. You will have one podium mic, one table microphone at the head table, which means if you have a panel, expect to be sliding the microphone back and forth to people. One audience mic on a stand. If you have time for Q&A in your presentation, please do make sure that the audience members ask their question into the microphone for the purposes of recording. Even if you're in a tiny room, we still need to get everyone onto and in front of a mic for recording purposes. There's a switcher at the head table for up to four laptop inputs. This can be really handy if you've got multiple people giving little slices of a presentation. Perhaps obviously it goes even smoother if you can combine everything onto one laptop but you do have that option there. The projector resolution is 1024x768 and it is VGA. So make sure for those of you who are bringing Macs that you've got your little thunderbolt adapter thingy. At 1024x768, you are looking at a four by three or four to three resolution, which means that if you're working in a 16 to nine resolution for your slides, it's going to be scaled down by your application. And let me just make sure that everyone is muted. I'm not entirely sure who this is. Folks, can you make sure that you, there we go. I think that may have been Jesse. Just make sure that you're muted when you come in. All right. And let me do that. I don't see the quick button to mute everyone. So I may need to pop off again if someone comes in and is unmuted. So again, just a reminder, if your slides have a different aspect ratio, not a problem, but they will get squished down. So you may want to test them in four by three or four to three ratios. You will have an audio jack for your laptop. If you've got video that you want to play that has audio associated with it. I don't know that you'll get a chance to test that ahead of time. Oh, so the pound the IRC channel is pound Drupal con everyone again pound Drupal con for the IRC channel. Okay, and of course, every room will have one screen and the sizes will vary per room. Now, the big note on this one is that there is no reference to lapel or Lavaguerre mics you can and I've already told stuff that I want them. But in pound Drupal con staff is there and if you can all remind her that we would really appreciate it as speakers because it means that we get to give a more authentic to who we are presentation because we're not feeling stuck behind the podium. By all means stand at the podium if you're more comfortable there. But I personally like getting away from the podium and standing on my own. So I have asked for them. We just don't have a reference to it in the room set up information that I was given. So, by all means, you want to ask stuff for Mike and she's in pound Drupal con right now and has no idea that I've just told you to ask for them. All right, so that's the room set up for most people. That slide is going to be the most important thing that I'm going to tell you about today. You're comfortable with audiences. You're comfortable with presenting and the rest of it is, you know, it's kind of neat, but you don't really need that information. The next three slides. So if you do stick around for these, that'd be fantastic. The Drupal con site supports you as a presenter, but we did have a number of problems in Munich. So I'm going to give you some things to watch out for in terms of the website and how things happen there. So first off, the, the request is that you up your upload your slides ahead of time. However, the slide field will not be publicly viewable on session nodes until the first day of the conference. And then it should be published for all sessions. Now, take a look and see if it's actually been published because there was a delay in Munich. The safest thing to do is once you know your slides are set, go ahead and publish or, or edit rather the body field for your presentation and put a link in the body field as well as the slide field so that if it doesn't get published right away, you don't have audience members complaining in their session feedback that your slides were not uploaded even though they were. Make sure that the right version of your slide deck is uploaded as of Sunday, May 19 because again, these should be automatically published and you don't want old slide decks in there. Please, please, please do include the conference intro and outro slides. This is for the audio visual team. It doesn't matter if the aspect ratio is off. It's just a visual cue for the video editor so that as they're fast forwarding through the video, they can stop when they see those intro and outro slides and clip from there. So in terms of different slide decks and different formats, open up those slides, take a screenshot of it and paste in the picture of the screenshot. Again, it doesn't matter if it's perfect. It matters that there is some kind of visual cue for the AV team as they're fast forwarding things in the video recording. Alright, so that's the public slide session recordings. You will not be recorded. It's going to be just the audio and the slide transitions and whatever plays on your laptop. So any video or any demonstrations that you do, that will be recorded but you as a person are not going to be recorded. The recordings generally are uploaded to the internet within 24 hours of your presentation. We've had really great luck the last couple of conferences with the speed of this. It's pretty much out of your hands once you've delivered the session. But generally speaking, if you've been tweeting about it and you want to let people know who couldn't attend DrupalCon when your session is available, look for it within about 24 hours. For the evaluation of your session, again, you'll have that outro slide which reminds people to do an evaluation. Your future speaking at DrupalCon is in part based on these evaluations. The more people you get to fill out those evaluations and the more positive evaluations you get, the better your chances are of coming back and speaking at a DrupalCon in the future. Note that the evaluation function goes live on the first day of the conference and you should be able to review your results immediately. You go to your profile which is in the My Account setting. Now, I say probably. If you don't have access to the session information, ping me as soon as possible at the conference because there's probably something wrong and we don't want to be losing session evaluation and we want to make sure that you have access to that information. You may want to not read them right away but definitely check to see if you can access them and if there's a technical problem, we'll get it fixed as soon as we possibly can. And like I said, there have been problems in the past but we think we have it fixed. So that's sort of the end of the administration part and you may have noticed that I said probably a lot. So things unfortunately do go wrong sometimes and sometimes they all go wrong at the same conference. So please, please, please consider it your responsibility, check any of the automated processes that I've talked about and let's hope that we don't have any of this fail all the things stuff and that everything will go smoothly. But those are a few of the things that you can watch out for and let us know as organizers if there's things that aren't working because chances are it's a really easy fix for us to implement for you. So if you are an experienced presenter and you have more information now than you thought you would get out of this, I won't be offended at all if you drop off for the rest of the call. Well, I will be talking about basically audience management dealing with nerves and a couple of other sort of tips and tricks that I've gained literally a couple of decades of presenting in front of audiences. So we'll start off with nerves and the first thing that I want to remind people of is that your adrenaline is normal and in many cases that little bit of adrenaline is actually going to help you deliver a more exciting and engaging presentation than if you didn't have any adrenaline in your system at all. I've got a couple of resources in this presentation, not the same slide sort of screenshots that I had in the previous one because obviously the topic is different. But one of the ones that I do want to highlight is this tiny URL my anxiety so tiny URL dot com slash my anxiety is normal for a bit more about this. You can, you can really work towards managing your nerves by focusing on the factors that you can control and there are a lot of factors that you can control. When I first started doing public speaking at the age of 10 years old, and I got really, really nervous when I got up in front of audiences. And then I had someone tell me in grade eight so grade eight I would have been 14 years old that she was like, but you're presenting in front of all of your friends when you're presenting to a school group. So why would you get nervous? You don't get nervous talking to them in person. And it took me a few more years after that to realize or to convince my body that she would absolutely right. But that's the way I think about a Drupal Khan presentation is that these are my friends that I'm presenting to, and by controlling a number of factors that I actually have control over, I can even deliver an awesome presentation when everything goes wrong. Now, this part of the presentation addresses all the ways that people can get nervous. And poor Matt, I freaked him out, leaning into Drupal Khan Denver, because it had never occurred to him that he might or should get nervous when he was getting up and speaking in front of people. So this is not meant to make you nervous. This is just meant to help you if you do think that public speaking is something that is a little bit nerve wracking. So the section basically is my mitigate all the failures section. And the more we think about failure ahead of time and we put in place our plan B, the more we can enjoy the plan A when everything goes perfectly and smoothly, knowing that we've got that plan B to fall back on. So the first one is dealing with technical failure and the technical failure can be any number of different things, but the biggest solution here is to be prepared to tell your story without any aids and it will be impossible for you to fail. So think about if you were to give your talk in a hallway track presentation, you know, just chatting with people outside of a session room. If you've got a story that you can tell and you know that you're excited about your topic, it's basically impossible for you to fail because you can just get up on stage and tell your story. Forget about the slides, forget about anything else. If you've got that story, you're going to succeed. The other one is to allow the others to fix your failures where possible. And one of the things that happened to me in Chicago was the wrong audio was being piped into my room. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The audience knew that they were not seeing me delivering a talk on PHP, which was happening sort of one room over. So I did other things and talk to the audience instead of trying to debug the failure because really watching someone debug on stage is not very engaging. But talking to the audience and sort of getting yourself started and making jokes if you have no audio or whatever it happens to be keeps people engaged and puts them in a better mood for you to start your actual presentation when things get fixed up. The next one is computer failure. And we have not had a problem at Drupal cons ever with laptops being stolen, but you could think of a computer failure as being as simple as someone stole your laptop. It could be as simple as you've just installed the latest patches for Debian and guess what your laptop doesn't boot now, unlikely to happen because Debian rocks, but you never know. So the solution here is to have your digital presentation aids on a USB stick in a software agnostic format, in other words, a PDF of your stuff that has no transitions, no arrows, no stuff, all staff together. But it's a really simple PDF of your presentation so that if you need to, you can just stick that USB stick into someone else's computer and give your talk. The next one is projector failure. Let's say, for example, your laptop and you try eight of them, none of them will connect to the projector or the bulb is died or something like that. Solution here, no problem. Just make sure your slides are uploaded to a public location, for example, the triple con website and allow attendees to download the slides and follow along on their laptop. Now, again, if you've already uploaded the slides, it's done for you and you don't have to worry about this because you can basically do like a story time read along and be like, okay, the magical fairy wave through on time to change the slide and people can follow along with you. The next kind of failure is an internet failure. This one is kind of a given. You should assume that you won't have internet. Sometimes there's a separate ethernet drop at the at the table and you can get your own internet connection for your laptop, but assume that you will not have internet assume that you'll be on the group wifi stuff and it's all going to suck. Solution for this one have a local copy of all external resources. So, for example, if you're, if you're wanting people to look at a video from YouTube, download that sucker and get it onto your laptop have screenshots instead of having to clip through a public website of all of the important things. If you are downloading something from a streamed site, I use the ant plugin on Firefox. There's one for Chrome. I can't remember what it's called in pound IRC. If you've got your favorite plugins for this kind of thing, go ahead and paste them into the pound Drupal con for people who need to download video for whatever reason. Next up, we've got microphone failure. Generally speaking, this is not your problem. However, and I cannot emphasize this enough. Do not. I don't care if you've been in a rock band since the age of two. Do not ever touch the microphone settings ever on the control board at your speaker station. Just because you've done this 100 times does not mean that the microphone board is set up in the same way or in a way that you are expecting. So the disasters that I've had in this one personally, which I've already mentioned in Chicago, the wrong audio was piped into my room. And the other one that I've seen happen in Munich, Morton adjusted the audio board to plug the soundtrack from his iTunes. That's the word I'm looking for into the room so that people could listen to music while he was getting set up. That was fine, except he didn't get it done in a way that the audio board was expecting it. And his session was recorded metal music. They didn't actually capture any of his audio. So please, please, please do not touch the mic settings on the board. Let the professional AV technicians do this for you. They're actually getting paid to be in that room, unlike those of us who are speaking and are simply volunteering our time. They will get it working the way you want it, but do not touch the board. And this is like probably the only time that I have seriously, seriously wagged my finger and said do not. So if I hear of people having the microphone board, I will be very cross with you. All right, on to the next one, recording failure. And yes, this does happen. Recording failure also is not your problem unless we make it your problem. And I'll get to that in a second. So the way around a recording failure, and yes, it does happen from time to time. If you have a white paper or a blog post that is an equivalent of your talk, or if you're able to print out the speaker notes, whatever it is. It's not quite as good as capturing the video, but all of the information will be there. One of the other ways that you can mitigate this disaster is if you, when you're practicing your talk, go ahead and screencast yourself giving the presentation. And then that's a presentation that could be uploaded to the internet instead of your Drupal con recording. Finally, yes, if it did happen, if there was a recording failure, you may be asked to give your presentation again. And that did happen in Munich. I think we had three sessions that had the incorrect audio recording. So Krell was giving his audio over top of Jesper's presentation. Sometimes it happens, not very frequently. But what the AV text will sometimes do is try and get a new room to have you represent your presentation. It's a great opportunity to go through the talk again and get it recorded for posterity's sake, shall we say. Your future internet fans can take advantage of it, and generally the people who come to the second delivery of it are there to have fun with you. It's just, it is a lot more fun than the first time you present something. All right. So if we want to have zero chance of failure, here's our little checklist. Go ahead and print out your slides so that you can give a presentation without a computer. Maybe the audience has downloaded your slide deck, but you can follow along with your slides. Upload your slides to the Drupal con site ahead of time and link them from the body field. Don't just rely on the field slide, sorry, on the slide field. There you go. Have all presentation aids on a USB stick and uploaded somewhere as a zip or something like that, whether it's dumped into Dropbox or just another location in addition to the Drupal con site. Some people are putting them up on GitHub, which is pretty cool too. Download all online resources, so for example video that you need to grab from the internet. Screencast what you cannot live without, for example, a demo. Everyone always who loves doing live demos gets really, really persnickety and really uppity about how I, you know, how dare I tell them not to do live demos, but you know what? Sometimes it doesn't work, folks, and that's annoying for the audience to watch you struggle through a demo that's failing. My example of this one is Drupal con Denver. Someone came to these speaker check-ins and they were like, I don't need to do that stuff, but okay, fine, whatever, I'll do it and I'll prove her wrong. And sure enough, he couldn't get his laptop to work for whatever reason. So he was able to play the demos that he'd done of himself doing sort of a quote unquote live demo, but it was just a screencast of the live demo. So again, you may think that you won't need it, but if you do, it sure is handy to have that little backup. Have a next point here, have a white paper for your talk or an extended blog post. You can often get more information into that than just the slide deck on its own. I quite like this white paper approach. Practice your talk in an empty room, out loud, start to finish three times, and record yourself all three times. Again, that recording part can just be, it doesn't need to be a high quality recording, but if something goes wrong with your presentation, now you've got three different recordings to choose from that you can upload to the Internet for people to see. On the day of your presentation, this is a new item that I've added in here recently. Pack clean clothes into your bag, shirt and trousers for that one time that you're walking down the hall with coffee in your hand and someone bumps into you. You also of course should pack your computer and your laptop charger. Your computer and laptop charger almost become optional if you've done everything else on this list, but the clean clothes, but I guess you could still a new t-shirt from someone who probably is running a booth with a t-shirt giveaway, but trousers, it's difficult to get a second pair if you've spilled coffee down yourself. So I'm just going to pause for a second here and make sure that folks still have audio. So can you in IRC let me know yes comma I do still have audio just so that it's not answering the question of have you lost audio to. Okay, great. And the audio sometimes does drop off if your buffering hasn't caught up to me. So I'm going to proceed because it looks like we've got the majority with audio. All right, so the next piece here is the concept of a routine. And ultimately I think that a positive routine really helps to eliminate failure and also reinforces the ritual that I think is really important in getting myself ready for presentations. But it's tricky if you're new to presenting to think of yourself as having a ritual if you've never done something before. So we'll look at the idea of sort of routine and what we can do leading up to the conference. This is just what I do. Please in pound Drupal con if you've got other things that you have as part of your ritual or your routine to get ready for presenting by all means just toss them into into the into the channel. So the first one that I want to highlight is this video and it's really funny. How to public speaking the tiny URL for this one tiny URL.com how to hyphen public hyphen speaking again tiny URL.com how to hyphen public hyphen speaking and all it's about five minutes long. I won't play it right now. And thanks Jesse for dumping in the URL into IRC. So five minutes worth of video. I mean if you can listen to two audios at once I bet some of you will probably click on the link right away. It's really funny though. And I think a really great way to think about getting ready for public speaking. And here we go. This is my my routine my ritual in in the sort of months leading up to the presentation. I probably will have thought a lot about phrasing and how I'm going to deliver the talk but I also I don't worry too much about getting the exact wording because part of what I've found for myself is that for the speeches where I've memorized word for word exactly what I'm going to say I personally am more likely to get lost and confused and mixed up if I forget the next individual word. So while using practicing and getting ready of leading up to the conference in the week before your presentation practice delivering your presentation but not necessarily thinking about just the languages and the words but actually in the Outfit that you are planning to wear on the day of and this tip came to me from. Oh, he's a pearl guy and he speaks a lot of Oskon and he delivers the Oskon speaker training. And he works with Paul Fenwick. Thank you Lorna Damian Conway. He's awesome. Okay, so he has a specific outfit that he always wears for presenting. It's a black golf shirt like a collared shirt and black trousers. And he knows that it's comfortable. He knows that he can hang a lapel mic off of the collar without it pulling down at the front. It's more of a problem for women's shirts than it is for men's shirts. But it's something that he knows he's going to be comfortable in and he knows that any of the gestures he's going to make or any of the things you're going to do will work in that outfit. So again, the week before decide what you're going to wear and practice delivering your presentation in that outfit. Ensure your intro and outro slides have been inserted into your slide deck. Again, Portland 2013 Drupal dot org slash speakers slash resources pound slides. If you haven't already grabbed those templates. Go ahead and write a packing list for all the things you'll want during your presentation. Excuse me. Everyone's packing list is going to be different, but it may include remote control VJ adapter singing for max a USB stick with your presentation on it. A printout of your slides, water bottle business cards, clean shirt and trousers for when you spell coffee down your front. So this is just your packing list. The week before your presentation get lots of sleep and eat well. So this next week coming up lots of sleep because really we all know that sleep is for after Drupal con. And if you're presenting on Thursday of Drupal con, you may not have received a lot of sleep leading up to your presentation. So the week of Drupal con on Monday or the day before, which would be oops, can I do this? Well, people hate it when I do this may 20th because my handwriting is lousy. There we go. So Monday or the day before your presentation, go find the room that you'll be presenting and present yourself introduce yourself to the team and basically thank them ahead of time. Check with them. If you are allowed to go ahead and stand up on the stage and look out the stage may not actually be set up yet if it's just sort of risers and blocks that are being placed in. So like you can check with them to make sure that the whole thing is stable and you're allowed to stand on it, but hop up on stage if it's not a problem. And yes, next week, Lorna and I are at a different conference getting ready for Drupal con. So our sleep needs to happen this week, which is why I was pausing on that one. And if you again, if you're allowed to, if it's not a problem, ask if you can set up your laptop and test your slides with projector. We've talked about this in the previous check-in. Put your slides up, go to the back of the room, make sure that they're high contrast, make sure that the font is big enough. Chances are if the room is empty, the AV folks will also give you some feedback on whether or not they think the slides are perceivable, like whether they're readable high enough contrast that kind of thing. So that's a great thing to do on Monday. Depending on when you're flying in, you may be able to do it sort of in that window of 7am to 10am while the keynote is going on as well the day of your presentation. The night before your presentation, pack up your bag, including all of your gear. You want a fully charged laptop, a power cable and a power adapter if you're coming from outside the US. You want your presentation on a USB as a PDF in case your laptop dies. Of course, you can also have the keynote or PowerPoint files or ODP open office document. Just in case the laptop you're presenting on does have that software. You want to print out of your speaker notes, whether that's just the PDF or the actual PDF of the slides printed or the notes as well. A water bottle filled up, although we should have water in the rooms for you as well. Don't forget your VGA display converter singing for the projector. A remote control if you have one. Clean trousers and a clean shirt. Again, this is a new one that I'm adding to the list for, you know, in case you have a beverage problem, a beverage spill right before your presentation. The night before your clothes for tomorrow and if you can go to bed early and sleep. If not, go to bed early and just chill out. I tend to watch crime drama the night before my presentation because I really like crime drama. All right, next one morning of your presentation. Get dressed pants on please. Actually, it's trousers on. I don't really care if you wear pants or not. But that's kind of a British thing. Anyways, look into the mirrors. Smile at yourself. You are going to rock this and visually if you. So this is kind of a weird thing. The more that you are smiling, the more likely someone is to smile back at you. And I mean, I say this on the next slide as well, but start practicing your smile because people get a lot friendlier. If you start by smiling at them eat breakfast, even if it's just an energy bar. If you don't think you're hungry, try eating something anyways. Smile a lot. I can't say this enough. And then as I mentioned before, the 7 to 10 am window can be a great one for doing a technical check in the room if you haven't been able to get in ahead of time. So, as Jake mentioned, yes, don't be afraid to admit if you're nervous. My, my only caveat on that is you don't. Once you get up on stage, you don't need to. To apologize for it. I mean, you can state that you're nervous, but it doesn't need to be something that is embarrassing or something that you need to excuse or. People really are there to support you and they want to help you and I have had some pretty awesome colossal speaking failures in terms of problems with stuttering and just massive, massive nerves. And for myself, I have found that sure you can state that you're that you're feeling nervous and you can tell people that whatever you need to do to get the reassurance that you that you personally need. People are probably going to know and they're probably going to encourage you, but you don't need to spend a lot of time apologizing for it. They're there to see your story and get excited for you about your story. So in my experience, the more that I can shift the excitement to the story, the more I focus less on the physical reaction that I'm having to being in the situation that I'm in. So making it about about sharing the story instead of simply fixating on on the nerves that that works for me. Every single person is going to be different. And we all show nervousness in different ways. So the more that that you can figure out what you need, the easier it's going to be for other people to provide that support and reinforcement for you. An hour before your presentation. I know this sounds kind of weird, but go do final P. Make sure that you don't need to go to the toilet during your own presentation. And then also go to the room that you're going to be presenting in. We do actually have a green room and Stephanie, I think has updated the FAQ on the speakers page. It is in room C 121. So again, the green room is C 121. And that should give you a quiet space to do some last minute preparation for your talk and also get out of the hallway track, which I found to be amazingly distracting before I need to present. During the setup of your, like, once you get on to the stage, by all means, if it's your time to get set up and there's still a presenter on stage doing Q&A, very politely tell them to get off. It's your time to get up now. And they can continue doing Q&A out in the hallway. There's absolutely no reason for them to eat into your time slot. First off, when you go into that room, again, introduce yourself to the AV people. They are getting paid to help you and they are lovely and friendly. I've even had people, AV technicians go and get me batteries for my remote control. They're just super friendly if I am super friendly to them first. Focus on getting yourself ready during this time. I generally defer questions about my presentation. So if people come up to me and want to chat, well, I'm getting ready. I just say, hey, look, I'm getting ready. Can we chat after the presentation or once I've got everything set up or whatever it is that I want for that particular day. I treat my setup as sacred time. It is my time for me. It is not my time for people to come up and ask me questions. Of course, people will now troll me now that I've said this, but it's my time and I need to do the things that I need to do. For me, this is easier if I minimize eye contact with the audience. In a very Canadian fashion, I would not look at you if I don't want to talk to you. This is actually a little bit more difficult with an American audience, but it's super obvious as a Canadian that if I'm not looking at you, then I'm not ready to talk to you, but that's how I do it. Before putting on your mic, you've been doing a lot of smiling, right? And so you've been smiling at people so that they smile at you and you feel more comfortable. It actually can make your face muscles tense up in a way that can make it more difficult to articulate words. So one of the things that can help loosen up is, and I always do an audio and I always feel ridiculous doing it, but you'll feel ridiculous doing it too. So doing a or noise before you put your mic on, what you're trying to do though is you're trying to loosen up your face muscles and you're trying to get them to be able to quickly and accurately articulate all of the words that you're going to say during your presentation. So again, before you put your mic on in the case of a lapel or lavalier mic. Finally, if you're going to test the mic, do not tap the mic, just blow into it. So I'll move my pop filter here and go. So just blow into the mic do not tap that sucker. This is again about, you know, kind of giving a shout out to the AV people as well who if they see that you're a little bit more professional, they just give you a little bit more respect. And once you're ready to go look out to the audience, smile, big smile to them. Finally, we are on to the actual presentation part. Smile at the audience, think about something happier, delicious, breathe in. And this one is actually, this is a trigger to the audience or a cue to the audience. So just before you start, give an audible sigh out. That will actually help to relax the audience. So it gives them an a cue, a physical cue, and not that you'll necessarily see the difference in them, but it prepares them for your beginning as well. So just, you know, sort of a descending sigh. And then you can begin your presentation. Tell your story with passion. Again, that passion is so important. At the end, say, thank you. Give the audience time to clap. They're going to want to reward you for this amazing amount of work that you've put into your presentation. Smile again. And you know what? Good job you. That's, that's it. You are now done your presentation. All right. So that's the end of my routine. There's probably been a couple of things happen in IRC. So let me just check to see if there's any questions. Nope, we're good. Okay, so let me switch right in now to the audience management part. Generally speaking, I have found that if I tell my story with passion, I have nothing to worry about. This is not like a triple issue. Well, it's just not, they're just people are much friendlier in person than they are in the issue queue. So there's a few things though in terms of how to handle the audience because different presenters like doing different things. So the more clues that you can get the audience, the more that they're going to behave in a way that is consistent with what you would like to do. So one of the first things is dealing with questions and or one of the only things rather is dealing with questions. I find excuse me. The audience just doesn't really know how to behave because every presenter will be different. So there's effectively three times you can take questions. The first one is at the end of the presentation. And so you can say to the audience, I'd like to keep this presentation as tight as possible so we can have more time for questions at the end. Say this at the beginning, obviously, please write down your questions during the presentation and ask them at the end. You could also ask them to tweet their questions and then you can review the Twitter feed afterwards. So that's the first one is to hold questions to the end. And Lorna, I see your question and let me just go through the three and then I'll come to it. The second one is during the presentation, you can pause at specific points and help people. I will take questions after I've explained this one piece and then again at the end of the presentation. So you can take them at specific points and of course the third time to take questions is basically at any time. And this is easier in smaller rooms where people are more likely to want to engage with you in a conversation. And depending on the kind of presentation you have, it may actually be more appropriate to stop and start the slide deck and really interact with the audience. And again, just giving them a clue at the beginning by saying if you have any questions at any time, please raise your hand, wave it loudly, whatever you need to do, but let people know that it's appropriate for them to jump in at any time. So the question from Lorna, do I take questions in different formats depending on the size of the audience or some other factors? It really for me depends on, again, when I'm making the decision, it depends on what the topic is. Some of my slide decks are, they're not interactive. And quite frankly, I spent a lot of time developing the flow of the presentation and I just don't want to be interrupted because it's about, for me, a smooth delivery of a generally shorter presentation. And then I've got other presentations that I'm more interested in basically workshopping the ideas with the audience, in which case the way that the presentation is designed is to have people jumping in and participating and actively engaging in the information as part of the presentation. So again, for me, it depends on how I've structured the presentation. It's become less about my nerves and dealing with trolls and those kinds of issues because I'll just structure the talk in different ways. So for you, it could be tell people to hop into an IRC channel. It could be tell them to tweet. It could be like all of these are completely acceptable. But I do recommend that people, as in the presenters, decide ahead of time how they want to engage with the audience and then ensure that the audience knows that these are the rules for this particular presentation. Does that answer your question, Lorna? Excellent. Okay. So the next one. So, okay, now you've got some questions. How are you going to deal with them? Generally speaking, I have found that there are only a couple of reasons that people ask the question and really very few of them have to do with people not understanding the material. I would say, you know, if we're going to divide it down, maybe 10% of the time people are confused and need clarification. And those ones generally are the easiest ones to answer. You just need to repeat a word or repeat a concept and then they get it. More likely the person wants to expand on the material or even more likely they want to tie the material to their own circumstances. And what I find is this tying the material to the own circumstances is like, okay, so I understand that. But I have this super weird edge case that has really nothing to do with your presentation, but I want answered anyways. Those are really annoying questions. So when they get asked, I'll give you some tips for those kinds of questions. Obviously, if someone's confused about what you've said, clarify what you have to say in your presentation. But when a question is asked, make sure that it gets captured. There are going to be floor mics. So make sure that that person and there may be handhelds as well in terms of the, if there's super big rooms and you need to pass the mic down to someone. But getting the original question captured in the recording is really quite helpful. The next thing to do, and this is a pause technique for you as a presenter. The next thing to do is to repeat the question, but rephrase it in a generic way, if possible, to make it relevant to the whole audience. And as you're rephrasing the question, you can decide, is the answer relevant to the core message of my presentation? And if it's not relevant, should I defer answering? So if someone has this super weird edge case thing, when you rephrase it, you can decide, you know what? This is really about that one person and it's not going to help the other 50 people in the room at all. So I'm not going to answer it right now. I'm going to get them to, here we go, defer answering the question. So you don't need to feel obliged to answer and you don't need to panic if you don't know the answer. Most commonly, if it's a super weird edge case thing, pretty specific and long-winded, can you please email it to me? By the way, there is zero obligation to actually answer this email. That's our little secret. If you don't know what the answer is, you can say, I have no idea. Next question. My mom went to see the Dalai Lama and it was like a stadium filled with 660,000 people. And this guy got up and asked a super long-winded question and the Dalai Lama's answer was, I have no idea. Next question, like he just didn't even entertain the person. So next question, or rather the next option here is great question, does anyone else know? If you actually want to know what the answer is, you can use the audience as a resource. Someone may be able to Google the answer, someone may have specific experience working on it, but you don't need to be the expert on every single weird thing that gets asked in the presentation. Finally, and this one is especially great for a Drupalcon, great question. Can you set up a birds of a feather session? Let people know on Twitter and then people who are interested get the questioner to stand up and find that way people will see who that person is and they can all sort of clump off and cluster off. It means that at the end of the presentation, if you have a number of these, you've identified experts in the room and you're not going to get as many people hammering you with questions. Maybe you want that attention, maybe you don't. But if you've established a number of experts, it means that at the end of the experience, there's other people to go to. And depending on how I'm feeling on that particular day, I maybe don't want to be pestered with questions at the end of it. So I'm just as happy for someone else to be the expert. I'll be the presenter at the front of the room who's comfortable giving the presentation, but I don't also need to be the subject matter expert for the rest of my life. So it's kind of nice sometimes to be able to identify those subject matter experts. Okay. Finally, I've got a couple of tips here on seeing the audience. And what I mean by seeing the audience is when you look out from the stage, who is it that you're presenting to? There are presentations that I prepare and I think, oh, I'm going to have 5,000 people show up for this presentation because it's the awesomest. And then I get 12 because actually I was the only one who's interested. You know, it happens. But the people who show up are always the right people who show up unless they weren't. And we did talk about in the very first one, getting those folks out of the room as fast as possible so that you can get really good evaluations on your presentation. I'll explain a little bit more about that in a couple of slides. So to see the audience, you can see them as 1 person and look at no individual person. You can look only at the back row where you can't identify faces or you can look only at the, you know, the 1st couple of rows and identify friendly faces. I tend to look at everyone in the audience and feel really smug about how I'm able to have this conversation about my favorite topic, which I Americanized with all of these people at once. And it really is what I do. I love looking out at the audience and seeing that people are there because they care about this thing that I have to say as well. Sort of with a little bit of a caveat, though, because I know that I need to keep my expectations low. People at conferences are tired. They're overwhelmed, maybe hungover and quite possibly jet lagged. So people will sleep during my presentation. People will write emails during my presentation. They're not going to maintain eye contact with me at all times. You know, it's like I get excited that people are there, but I don't demand too much of my audience. The 1 thing that I do not tolerate and I will stop presentation if I am having problems with this. I will not tolerate people talking during my presentation. It disrupts the people who are around them who are trying to listen to the presentation and it prevents me from being able to determine if they're confused about the material or talking about where they're going for lunch. I encourage you as well as a presenter. Either, if you're not comfortable doing it yourself, have someone in the audience, sort of in the first couple of rows that you can signal to and will get up and go and stop the talkers if it's a problem for you. You do not need to tolerate this and in part you don't need to tolerate it because it will disrupt the people who are around the talkers. So, be excited that they came, have low expectations and don't tolerate bad behavior. Kind of my final tip, haters going to hate. Some people are just negative. You probably know this from the issue queue and it's not anything to do with what you've done. It's all about them just being haters. I like to get the haters out of the room as fast as possible with a pre-talk overview. So, I tell them what I'm going to be talking about and I say to them, if this is not of interest to you, you should leave now because it's not going to be of interest to you. So, why would you sit here? Go find a different session or go hang out in the hallway track or whatever it is that you want, but be really clear to people. The next thing I do is I make sure that people understand it's about them having a good time, like you don't want to waste their time. And if you can get them out of the room, it means you've got a better chance of having only the people who are going to love your talk and be excited to be there. There's probably going to be some people who are checking email who didn't hear you tell them what the talk was going to be about. So, they're not going to bug anyways. But, yeah, it's just, you know, give people a chance to be where they want to be during your Drupal con session. The pre-talk overview during the recording, generally speaking, you won't know when the recording starts. I tend, I personally tend to do this as part of my, like, very first my intro slide, not the about me slide, but like before I even start my slide deck. If you're not comfortable doing this, that's absolutely fine. Again, it's just something that I personally do. I try to clear the room of people who aren't interested or who've misread my description before I start delivering my actual presentation. So, a quick summary of everything we've gone through. You've been listening for an hour. I'm super impressed that everyone is stuck through it. So, thanks so much. Remember that this is exciting to deliver a presentation. A little bit of adrenaline is completely normal. Being a little bit nervous is completely normal. And again, it gets you excited and gives often a more engaging and fun delivery for the audience if you've got that little bit of adrenaline. Practice telling your story with your slides. If you can, go ahead and record it. Prepare for technical failure by telling your story without your slides. So try, you know, may not be the identical presentation, but see if you can give that story without your slide deck in place. Have and use a packing checklist. And I had a few suggestions earlier in the presentation of what you might want to put on that packing checklist. There's also one at the very bottom of the speaker resources page for Drupalcon. And ultimately, I am really looking forward to hearing your story at Drupalcon and I'm looking forward to seeing almost all of you in Portland. But one of you, Lorna, I will see you next week in Chicago where we have a couple of presentations at conferences before we head out to Drupalcon Portland and Drupalcon has now thrown confetti. So obviously it's the end. Thanks everyone. I'm going to end the recording and hop over into IRC for any follow up questions. So once again, thanks everyone and I'm so looking forward to seeing you in Portland. It's going to be an awesome conference and you are going to do an awesome job as a presenter.