Boldly Open

I'm an easily bored kind of guy: if you want me to pay attention to what you're saying, you're better make sure that the topic is interesting enough AND that you're presenting it the right way.

This gets extemely important if I'm at a conference and I'm following your talk: there is a good chance I can get Internet access while you're talking, and if you don't manage to grab my attention, I will happily switch to surfing and e-mail. So, in the spirit of being constructive, here are a few random suggestions for you to make sure I listen up.

Slides: the root of all evil. I'm strongly convinced that a good talk doesn't need slides at all, except from graphs, code snippets and nice pictures, however I also realize that slides is what the audience is expecting nowadays. That being said, I have a whole sleeve of problems with slideware, but let's stick to the main points:

• first of all, here is some news for you: we all can read. If your presentation is all about reading slides, than thanks but I can do that myself in a fraction of the time it's taking to you. Not to mention that what you're saying is no news anymore.
• for the same reason, mile-long slides should be avoided. Stick to a few bullet points, and make them interesting enough for me to hear from you what was that catchy phrase about.
• do your homework, and study your slides. It sucks so badly when you advance to the next slide and stop for a few seconds to actually read it. Actually, you should start talking about the next slide before it hits my eyes: have me expect something, and I'll be all ears

The way you present: in most cases, if attendees' thoughts were floating as comics balloons, you would see a bold and loud "BORING!" flashing all over the room. Ok, this is technical stuff so you shouldn't act like a clown, but still there are a few tricks that keep us from snoring:

• walk around: don't do your presentation sitting on a table or standing behind a conference desk, as if you were nailed to it. If you move around, the audience will have to follow you, and coincidentally might even hear a word or two of what you're saying.
• if you walk around (and you should) do a favor to us all, and buy yourself a wireless presenting mouse: it's just a few bucks, but it will radically change your audience experience. Changing slides shouldn't require walking to your notebook and click a mouse: we'll get bored in no time flat, especially if you're the kind of guy who needs to read what the next slide is about. I know it's just a second or two, but it's more than enough to kill the attention threshold.
• use your body: have some gesture walking your talk. Clap your hands, raise your arms, snap your fingers, squat, duck, tilt: everything would do. Let us know you're a human being, with moving parts.
• change your tone of voice: 50-60 minutes are way too long to pay attention to what seems a Text-To-Speech automatic output. Shout, whisper and talk: the audience will be with you.
• look at me. Actually make sure you look in turn everyone in their eyes. If you stare at the end of the room, people won't feel you're having a conversation with them, and will start wondering where to go for dinner.
• interact with the audience. Perform show of hands, and ask the audience a few open questions. But be careful with it: keep in mind that the audience came to the room to hear something from you, not the opposite. Also, if you're giving a talk to an international audience, know that you might get less feedback because people are shy to speak out in a foreign language. And there little if anything worst than an open question with no answers.

Finally, you: given all the points above, ask yourself is you're the speaker kind at all. This has nothing to do with tecnical background: I'm sure you know your stuff. But do wonder whether:

• do you have a sound knowledge of the language you're speaking, if that's not your native one? A telling sign is knowing a few jokes and being able to leverage them. If you're barely able to write short emails and/or you have a frightening accent that won't let anyone but your fellow countrymen undestand what you're saying, the answer is probably not.
• do you feel comfortable standing in front of a crowded room? If you're somewhat shy or easy to feel under pressure, that will show up: you'll speak with a feeble tone, you'll start muttering stuff, and the audience will turn its attention to something more interesting like counting people in the room and performing statistics over their hair colour.

Presentation is somewhat a form of art: like it or not, technical content is not enough to have people walk out enthusiastically from your room thinking they learnt something or that they definitely give your stuff a try: the way you're presenting makes the difference. Make sure you're entertaining: you're audience will thank you, and they will come back to your next talk.

No, that's not my colleague Ugo Cei, who's currently having his ApacheCon speech in a packed room with people standing and sitting on the floor. And of course it's not me either. The Ugo I'm talking about is my good friend Ugo Landini, who just started a blog where he plans to write about his pet peeve: Obiect Oriented software software written the way it should be.

Ugo is really passionate about OOP: at times I consider him a bit of a code Taliban, but this is only because I know how much he's right and I'm wrong. Ugo has been writing some really good stuff about patterns and object orientation as a whole in the past years, and having him enter the blogosphere is great news: I have great expectations and I'm looking forward to read his rants and pearls of wisdom. Subscribed!

Sometimes I wonder how startups with plenty of VC and marketing funds,manage to choose stupid names without any research. The new kid on the block is yet another company building yet another CMS with an Open Source license and no community: boring enough in itself. Finding out they decided to call themselves Alfresco just makes me laugh: "al fresco" in italian is slang for "in jail". Oh well, at least our small Open Source CMS market in Italy won't be threatened that much...

Upon further reading, actually this isn't much of a surprise: from the "we don't have a clue about Open Source" department, here is the only information about community I have been able to find on their website:

Alfresco provides forum-based support to:

• Our customers (with whom we have contracted services)
• Organizations during the software evaluation process

In the future a valid serial number (purchased or evaluation) will be required to access the forum

The rest of their website is just too sad to comment: it would probably be a great foundation for a "Open Source business mistakes to avoid" presentation. I understand how these guys don't deserve so many pointed fingers, but I'm just fed up: as someone who's been building business and reputation with and around Open Source for a while, I just don't want to be in the same boat with this kind of companies, yet there are just too many of them, and they seem to be great honeypots for VC funding.

Bottom line: if this is what "professional Open Source" is going to be, I'm off to carrot farming.