From GStudwel at co.jefferson.co.us Tue Oct 26 14:38:26 2004 From: GStudwel at co.jefferson.co.us (Gary Studwell) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:38:26 -0600 Subject: How do -you- find speakers ? Message-ID: Hi, This is partly to see if the list is working, but also to ask the question: how does your local go about selecting topics and finding speakers? It seems we (CO-SAGE) are always on the lookout for speakers. We're not totally averse to vendors, but we've been burned in the past with no-shows and salespeople of the "oh, the techie couldn't come" and "how many can I sign you up for" varieties. Anybody care to share tips ? Gary Studwell gstudwel at co.jefferson.co.us CO-SAGE is Colorado SAGE, btw From tal at whatexit.org Wed Oct 27 10:37:11 2004 From: tal at whatexit.org (Tom Limoncelli) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:37:11 -0400 Subject: How do -you- find speakers ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: A couple things: 1. If anyone gets a paper accepted at LISA, we ask them to do a dress rehearsal at our meeting. 2. Ask your local vendors, be sure to inform them that technical people must speak, not the salespeople. 3. Have 3-4 people volunteer to be a panel on a topic: Spam, Tools, whatever the hot topics are this month. 4. Have an "ask the experts" night. Tell people that you'll have a panel of 5 people that can answer any IT related topic. You don't need a panel, you can "surprise" people by announcing that "the audience is the panel". Now you only need a single person, someone that is really funny and a good moderator. Note: ban the moderator from answering the questions until at least 3 other people have spoken. Otherwise, they'll be tempted to answer every question himself. That's what we do at $GROUPNAME. www.groupname.org Tom On Oct 26, 2004, at 5:38 PM, Gary Studwell wrote: > Hi, > This is partly to see if the list is working, but also > to ask the question: how does your local go about > selecting topics and finding speakers? > It seems we (CO-SAGE) are always on the lookout > for speakers. We're not totally averse to vendors, > but we've been burned in the past with no-shows > and salespeople of the "oh, the techie couldn't come" > and "how many can I sign you up for" varieties. > > Anybody care to share tips ? > > Gary Studwell gstudwel at co.jefferson.co.us > CO-SAGE is Colorado SAGE, btw From jochen at remote.org Wed Oct 27 11:59:11 2004 From: jochen at remote.org (Jochen Topf) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:59:11 +0200 Subject: How do -you- find speakers ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20041027185911.GA21828@eldorado.remote.org> On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 03:38:26PM -0600, Gary Studwell wrote: > This is partly to see if the list is working, but also > to ask the question: how does your local go about > selecting topics and finding speakers? > It seems we (CO-SAGE) are always on the lookout > for speakers. We're not totally averse to vendors, > but we've been burned in the past with no-shows > and salespeople of the "oh, the techie couldn't come" > and "how many can I sign you up for" varieties. > > Anybody care to share tips ? I have been organizing a local SAGE group in Karlsruhe, Germany, for the last three years. We meet about every two months and generally have two talks each evening, sometimes there is a panel discussion or other event instead. Speakers have mostly been recruited out of the group itself. Some have walked up to me and offered to do a talk, but in most cases I asked them to. We don't allow sales people and I am always suspicious of *any* vendor people I don't know. In many cases recruiting works like this: I hear somebody talk about his pet project somewhere and ask him, whether he can give a talk on that. Sometimes they say yes, often they don't. I write this down and ask them again later. Some people need a few prods, some will never do it. Good opportunities to do this are, obviuously your meeting itself, other meetings and conferences. After a while it becomes second nature to always think about how you can "exploit" people for your meeting. I also keep my eye open when interesting people are in the vicinity and could come around easily or when I read news about people in the area doing interesting work. This works reasonably well but depends much on how many opportunities you have to talk to fellow IT people. And you have to write down those ideas and follow up on them, even if it doesn't work out the first time. I agree with Tom that having a panel is also a good idea. Worked really well for us several times. But you need a good moderator and you need to prepare. Discussions can easily stray from the topic (which isn't necessarily bad) and can easily dissolve into several people talking round and round in circles (which is bad). But if you have the moderator to keep things moving it can be a great evening. Also you can get more audience participation than for talks. And another idea that I stole from LISA WIP sessions and modified slightly: Get five or so people to prepare 5 minute talks about a piece of software, or a neat shell trick or whatever. Something they use every day and think is great. Something everybody should know, but probably doesn't. Give them 5 minutes to talk and then open things up for a 5 minute general discussions. The audience will contribute their own tricks and you'll get great audience participation and new ideas for everbody to take home. Make sure to keep everything short, so the people who already know about the topic don't get bored. This is a lot harder for you to coordinate, because you need 5 speakers instead of one. But it is a lot easier for the speakers so you'll get more. Jochen -- Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 From andrewbarnes at ramsesit.com Wed Oct 27 12:01:46 2004 From: andrewbarnes at ramsesit.com (Andrew Barnes) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:01:46 +0100 Subject: How do -you- find speakers ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi Gary, At Sage-IE (http://ie.sage.org), to date we have been using guild members to do presentations almost exclusively - there have been one, possibly two, presentations by a vendor. We have actually found this quite effective, as the talks do tend to be on topics of interest to members, and have all been well received to date. You could also argue that this also presents a technical audience to try their hands at a skill that they may not normally be exposed to (ie. presentation/communications), in an environment that isn't quite so confrontational The poor vendor who presented, that I'm aware of, was pre-warned with "this is a group of techies - you might want to focus your presentation as such"... poor guy didn't *quite* target it right, and was fairly grilled in question time over what were perceived as "dubious" comments. In fairness, the presentation was quite good, and informative, however did, IMHO, have that slight sales slant which attracted the rather pointed questions. A few badly phrased comments did, as I mentioned, open him up to a bit of a grilling. I personally think that vendor presentations would be an excellent way of introducing the members to a broader range of products and solutions. However, I do think that it's in everyone's best interests to perhaps develop a set of "guidelines" for the presentation, where the target audience/pitch is identified up front as either "for the techies", or "a technical presentation with a potential sales slant". If this were the case, then I think that at least the members who attend would be more receptive to the presentation, knowing what it's angle is. And perhaps allow the vendor (or other) presenter to use an "adequately" prepared presenter, or at least have a few extra people along who can handle the hard-hitting questions. I would also recommend that when announcing the presentation, that you emphasise that your SAGE chapter is a "vendor tolerant" environment, and that a presentation by a specific vendor does not necessarily imply your chapter has a particular bias/preference - one way or another. This of course becomes interesting if you're lucky enough to have a vendor sponsor your local SAGE chapter in some way - but that's a topic for another day, and another thread! Don't know if this helps or not! Hope it does though! Andrew On 26 Oct 2004, at 22:38, Gary Studwell wrote: > Hi, > This is partly to see if the list is working, but also > to ask the question: how does your local go about > selecting topics and finding speakers? > It seems we (CO-SAGE) are always on the lookout > for speakers. We're not totally averse to vendors, > but we've been burned in the past with no-shows > and salespeople of the "oh, the techie couldn't come" > and "how many can I sign you up for" varieties. > > Anybody care to share tips ? > > Gary Studwell gstudwel at co.jefferson.co.us > CO-SAGE is Colorado SAGE, btw > > -- Andrew Barnes E: andrewbarnes at ramsesit.com W: http://www.ramsesit.com M: +353863803633 From jochen at remote.org Wed Oct 27 13:11:21 2004 From: jochen at remote.org (Jochen Topf) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 22:11:21 +0200 Subject: How do -you- find speakers ? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20041027201121.GA23092@eldorado.remote.org> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 08:01:46PM +0100, Andrew Barnes wrote: > solutions. However, I do think that it's in everyone's best interests > to perhaps develop a set of "guidelines" for the presentation, where > the target audience/pitch is identified up front as either "for the > techies", or "a technical presentation with a potential sales slant". If I have a speaker I don't know, I try to talk to him beforehand on the phone or, even better, see him in person. This way I can talk things over, give him a feel for the audience etc. But of course this isn't always possible and also means more work. Jochen -- Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298