Convention Session Presenter Instructions

Page Contents:

• What to Do Next
• Speaker Registration Information
• Important Dates
• Presentation File Formats
• Designing Your Presentation
• Dos and Don'ts About Presentation Content

Thank you very much for joining us as a presenter at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. It is the hard work of presenters like you that make conferences successful. We appreciate you for taking on the role of technical leader and instructor to the community. Please plan on speaking to a technically sophisticated audience. O'Reilly is known for providing deep technical background and its events attract intermediate and advanced programmers and very few beginners.

The instructions that follow provide all of the information to help make your presentation successful. They include details on speaker registration, deadlines, A/V, and specifications for materials we need from you.

What To Do Next

1. Register for the convention
   You must register to be confirmed as a speaker. Registering will also ensure that you receive your badge and materials when you get to the convention. You will be notified by email when registration is open, and registration for speakers is complimentary. As part of this process, you will be asked to:
   
   
   1. Fill out the audio-visual section
      This form has a complete list of all equipment that we provide in our standard setup. Please specify any additional requirements that you might have, and we will do our best to accommodate you.
   
   
   
   2. Agree to the speaker contract
      Read over the speaker agreement in the registration section and confirm that all information is correct. When you click on the acceptance button, that constitutes your acceptance of the terms of this agreement, including these instructions.
   
   
   
   3. Select any tutorials that you wish to attend
   
   
   



2. Arrange travel and make hotel reservations
   You are responsible for all hotel and travel-related expenses. Contact the convention hotel to receive the discounted O'Reilly convention room rate. If you need assistance obtaining other discounted hotels or with travel arrangements (airfare, rental cars, etc.), please contact:
   
   

   Vivian V. Russell Travel Services
   182 Farmers Lane, Suite 102
   Santa Rosa, CA 95405
   Phone: (707) 525-0550
   Fax: (707) 525-0560
   Email: vivianv@sonic.net




3. Important Dates

   We have set the following deadlines to make sure that the planning of the convention goes smoothly for presenters and participants. Please use this as a checklist so that you will have a handy reference guide to help you prepare for the event.

   Please submit materials on or before the due dates!

   March 30, 2003
   • Book your travel to the convention now. Early reservations mean that you get better flights and rates.
   
   
   April 30, 2003
   • Registration must be complete, which includes speaker contract and audio-visual information.
   
   
   June 10
   • Presentation materials in electronic format are due -- HTML, Star Office, PowerPoint, PDF or Keynote formats. Send your file by email to Vee McMillen -- vee@oreilly.com. If your file is too large to email, you can FTP it to ftp:/ftp.oreilly.com. Place the file in the folder called incoming and send an email to Vee McMillen to let her know the file is in and the name of the file. You do not need to provide hard copy for convention session materials.
   
   
   July 7-11, 2003
   • O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Please check in at the Speaker Room when you arrive on site. This will give you an opportunity to meet with the Speaker Logistics Manager, Vee McMillen; pick up your materials and any schedule changes; and meet with the audio-visual experts to make sure that your presentation will load and present correctly. You will be provided with scheduled times to meet with A/V.
   
   
   At the Convention
   At the convention, look for the "Speakers Lounge." Here, you will receive:
   • One speaker badge
   • Convention materials
   • Convention schedule of events
   • Your personal schedule of events, including any changes

Presentation File Guidelines

All session slides will be presented from electronic files using the latest in computer projection equipment. We can project files from your laptop (if you are able to arrive in time to have your machine synchronized with our equipment by our A/V techs) or from show computers available in the room. We support the following file types as a standard on our show computers (which are all dual-boot):

• Adobe PDF
• HTML
• Linux OS
• StarOffice
• Mac OS X/OS 9 (Classic)
• Microsoft PowerPoint

We provide Internet connectivity in all of the session rooms, and wireless connectivity is available in the main public areas.

In preparing your electronic files, consider how the slides will project.

Please send us your electronic files in one of the above file formats. Email the file to Vee McMillen after compressing it in a standard file format (.zip for Windows, .tar-z for Linux). In your email transmitting the file, please let us know what exactly we will find in the archive file (file name and type). If you use hypertext-linking features, please be sure to follow ISO 9960 format for file/link names (8.3 all uppercase).

Email all files by the deadline date to vee@oreilly.com. You do not need to provide a hard copy.

Your Presentation

Your presentation will be projected on a large screen and viewed by your audience from a distance. Below are some guidelines we have found that ensure that everyone gets the most out of your presentation.

• Create a cover slide that includes the following (or use our template, available for download from the Speaker Information page):
• Session title
• Your name, title, and company
• Your email address
• Name of the event and where you are presenting
• Use high-contrast background and type colors
• Limit content to three to five lines per slide, not including the title line
• Use large, easy-to-read sans-serif fonts
• Provide a slide number on each slide

• Use reversed-out type (e.g. white type on a dark background)
• Use colors that clash or create optical effects (e.g. red type on a turquoise background), or busy or blurry graphic backgrounds.
• Clutter your slide with repetitious information

Dos and Don'ts About Presentation Content

O'Reilly conferences attract primarily intermediate and advanced attendees. As such, they tend to draw only serious and experienced programmers, developers, technical staff and webmasters. Our experience has shown that the following guidelines can help you deliver a successful presentation to this demanding audience.

• Focus on your subject. Attendees will expect to go away from your presentation having learned something new and helpful. If you feel the topic you've taken on is too broad to be covered well in the time allotted, talk to us. Let's see if we can hone in on a portion of the subject that can be discussed thoroughly in the time frame. It will be vastly preferable for you to cover less material well than to provide a broad-brush overview of a subject.

• Assume your audience is experienced and sophisticated but that it isn't expert in the subject that you are discussing. Limit background material to the essentials for understanding your presentation. It is not only fair, but also useful for you to state early in your presentation what you assume your audience already knows.

• Allow enough time at the end of your presentation for questions and answers. Attendees at technical conferences repeatedly report that they derive as much benefit from the Q&A portion of the sessions as from the presentations themselves, in many cases. As a guideline, presenters should allow for 10 minutes of Q&A per hour of presentation.

• Use real-world scenarios and speak from your personal experience, with specific applications of the technology. Your audience will better retain the information you present if it is anchored by examples from the real world.

• Make blatant product presentations or pitches. Attendees don't like it, it doesn't do your product any good, and it damages the conference's reputation. If you feel it necessary, you can mention your product briefly either in the context of defining your credentials or as an example of a category of products that is germane to your topic. Please don't go beyond that. This applies to books, also. Presenters who violate this guideline will not be invited to return.

• Simply read your slides. You'd be surprised how many speakers get up in front of a group, display their first slide and essentially read its contents to the audience, then go to the next slide and do the same. If your slides have your entire talk on them, they might be too busy in the first place.

• Allow your presentation to run longer than the time slot that you have been allocated. Rehearse your presentation and make sure that it fits the time slot and allows ample Q&A time.

Regards,

Vee McMillen
Speaker Logistics Manager
http://conferences.oreilly.com/etcon/

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