We had such positive feedback for the session we ran on Thursday the 23rd of January I thought it might be useful to write up the details as it might help others who want to start speaking. I should begin by thanking Saskia Coplans (@ms_chief on Twitter) and the InfoSec Hoppers (https://www.infosec-hoppers.com/) for providing help and information that contributed to this session.
If you are looking to run your own session the format is listed below and then I’ll go into a little more detail.
Introduction
Lightning Talks
Panel Questions
Worksheet part 1 in pairs
Worksheet part 2 in pairs
Introduction
After our usual welcome, we set the outline of how the evening would progress.
Lightning Talks
To start us off Colin and Natalie both gave lightning talks on speaking tips and their experiences. We thought it was important to have a couple of examples of talks and having them on the subject in hand was even better.
Panel
I joined Natalie and Colin in working through set questions all related to speaking. The questions with brief summaries of the answers are detailed below.
Panel questions:
What made you want to start speaking publicly? Get to go to conferences that due to cost or lack of company support we might not otherwise be able to attend. Reputational add. Had something they wanted to share.
What have you got out of speaking publicly? Reputation, friends, knowledge from being at the conference, confidence and improvement of presenting
How do you manage nerves and anxiety? Breathing techniques before going on. Practice and repetition don’t stop it but helps. Knowing everyone in the audience and the organisers want you to succeed.
What’s your worst experience speaking? Having a laptop fail and needed to finish without the slides. Coughing but hardly notice on playback. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fYSL77f7T0&list=PLBQEnHHRWGFpDJoG4u42AfX2K-L4Na_So&t=2s&index=2)
What makes an interesting talk or workshop / what are conferences looking for? Not best placed perhaps but I like, stories, introductions to new, tricky topics
Where do you get your ideas from? Three lightning talks on the same subject with intro, links and summary
How do you find places to speak? Online sites like CFP or Papercall have lots of conferences but lots of pay to speak ones too. Follow conferences on twitter so you know when the call for papers is. Ask to speak at meetups for experience, feedback and ‘real’ practice.
How do you deal with a question if you don’t know the answer? Well, it must be a great question, if you don’t know so say so. Suggest places the answer could be found. Offer to look up and tweet it out. Ask the audience
Worksheet part 1
You will find links to download the worksheet at the end of this article.
Working in pairs we encouraged the attendees to write their bios and then give each other feedback on what might make the subject of a talk. Whether they have more questions on anything included or there was anything interesting. Each part was given 10 minutes so 20 in total.
It was interesting walking around the room and listening in to conversations how many times people said things like, ‘there’s nothing interesting in mine’ or ‘I don’t know what to put’. After a few open-ended questions and a little probing, it didn’t take long to find potential areas they could speak about.
I believe some of this was due to self-belief or a lack of confidence and as I said on the night, everyone has things to say because their experiences are theirs alone. I honestly believe that everyone involved in the creation of something, our context is tech, but I think it equally applies across creative industries, has had a conversation in the last two weeks that could be the subject of a lightning talk.
I offered up my own bio as an example of one. From it, could you guess I talk about accessibility, a lot?
Adrian ‘Ady’ Stokes. A long-time accessibility advocate with over 20 years’ experience in Audit, Business Intelligence and Test roles. With a thirst for learning and continually improving he's always looking for ways to share information from my blog to a monthly newsletter and global quality initiatives at work. He is a great believer in community and helps the great one in Leeds by co-organising the Ministry of Testing Meetup. WebAIM found that 98% of 1 million home pages failed WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) in August 2019. We can and must do better! “I believe accessibility is fundamental to applications and greatly undervalued causing many problems for lots of users. I'm trying to spread the message that accessibility isn't about disability, it’s about inclusion!” @cricketrulz
Worksheet part 2
The second part was all-around generating talk ideas with the pairs providing feedback for each other again. Again, there was a similar feeling of not having things to talk about and I had similar conversations to the first part.
Whatever you are passionate about. Whatever challenges you have had, failed at or overcame. Whatever really winds you up or you wish were different. These are all basis for talks. Find 3 related parts of that subject and you have yourself the basis of a conference talk.
What next?
We are having a new voices evening in May where we hope that attendees, and indeed anyone else who wishes to, can try their hand at speaking in a warm and friendly environment. Between then and now we are available to offer help, advice and feedback to whoever wants it. Contact me or any of the organisers through @LeedsMoTMeetup (https://twitter.com/LeedsMoTMeetup) on Twitter
Thank you from the Leeds MoT Meetup organisers, Suman Bala, Steven Burton, Colin Wren and me, Ady Stokes Written on palindromic day, 02-02-2020