A movie goes about two hours. If you enjoy the movie, you will not notice that you just spend two hours. It will touch you, and you will have a lot to think about – at least for a good movie. A talk of Vinton G. Cerf feels exactly like a good movie.
Conferencing & Presentations
Posted by md
on February 15, 2006
I think it is time to wrap up my experiences regarding presentations. Now, I investigted how I do presentations for almost 5 months, I have given a lot of presentations and used the opportunities to experiment a little. Now, being at a conference and seeing a lot of presentations, it almost hurts.
The picture above shows the average computer science conference powerpoint deck. Actually, the talk was really interesting and good, but the powerpoint slides were just useless. Please, get away from using bullet lists and putting a lot of text on slides. Of course, you can break the rule if it helps your talk. Think of giving a talk, and the slides are just the background that may help you – or not.
Use pictures. Not only diagrams, but real pictures. Get them from Flickr or iStockPhoto. Tell a story. Even if you are just explaining technical details, you can use an example to illustrate it. And connect your story to pictures. If you talk about the EGEE project, you can use very impressive pictures of particle accelerators, etc. Avoid templates. After the first conference day, no one can stand them any more. This is especially true for GGF slides, e.g. the IP policy slide.
My fear was that my presentation doesn’t look reputable. But this isn’t true – you must make sure you know what you’re talking about, and foster discussions whenever possible. You audience will appreciate your efforts.
The schizophrenic nature of standarization work
Posted by md
on February 14, 2006
This GGF, I really feel the schizophrenic nature of standardization work:
- As a student, I have to throw away all cool features of my scheduler. Ouch. It hurts.
- As co-chair of the OGSA-RSS Working Group (Open Grid Services Architecture – Resource Selection Services), I have to go for a simple interface that can be mapped to a lot of projects.
I feel that I have to think about it for a time until I’ll be happy with it.