Thursday was the day for building the agenda for the UKOUG Technology and E-Business conference.
Last year we had a conference that lasted five days and covered every product that Oracle owned. This year we’re running a series of seven separate conferences covering different areas of Oracle’s offerings; so the Tech and EBS event is back to the three day event we always used to hold in Nov/Dec.
You would have thought that this would make it easier to produce the agenda – but we had about 640 abstracts for about 200 time slots; and in my particular stream (“Server Technology”) I think we had more than 200 abstracts for 55 slots – so if you’ve got in, you’ve done very well. (There are other “Tech” streams, including development tools, Apex, Middleware and so on).
The abstracts this year covered a lot of very interesting topics, making it harder than ever to create a balanced agenda. The results from the on-line judging (any potential or previous speakers can volunteer to get inv0lved) helped a lot – but there were so many highly regarded abstracts that it still took most of the day to work things out.
Just to give you an idea of the balancing act we had to perform: one of my abstracts was the second highest scoring in the stream – but I won’t be presenting it because (a) another abstract on the same topic had a very good score and (b) two of my other abstracts had been scheduled and we decided we had to set a limit of two presentations per speaker to maximise the range of speakers available to the audience.
In fact, the standard was so high this year that when I looked at the “reserves” list I thought we could probably put on a really good event just from the reserves. So if you’re on the reserve, remember (a) you were still rated very highly, (b) there are bound to be some cancellations, and (c) we’d still love to hear you speak – so how about putting your name down for a couple of SIG events.
I don’t know how this technically work, but if the “reserves” are so good, why don’t put them on the web?
At least they deserve this!
Comment by lascoltodelvenerdi — July 14, 2009 @ 9:41 am UTC Jul 14,2009 |
Generally, people don’t write their presentation until after they are selected!
Comment by David Kurtz — July 14, 2009 @ 10:51 pm UTC Jul 14,2009 |
Judging by the manic activity in the Speaker lounge and other quiet corners during the conference, people don’t write their presentations until, ooohhh, a few minutes before “Show Time”
(I deny every having done that myself….)
Comment by mwidlake — July 17, 2009 @ 10:51 am UTC Jul 17,2009 |
lascoltodelvenerdi,
There’s a big difference between talking through a presentation and putting it on the Internet. Also, the presentations belong to their authors, not to the user group, so we have no control over publishing them. We always ask the presenters if we can publish on the user group website, of course, and many of the reserves end up on the website anyway because (a) a few of the original presenters have to cancel, and (b) they often present at some of the SIG events we run throughout the year (see calendar).
David,
“Generally” sounds a little extreme, but I suspect you’re probably right that a fairly high proportion of the presentations are created specially for the event – even if some of them are then rehearsed at SIGs in the months prior to the event.
Martin,
I think there’s an important distinction to be drawn between “writing” and “fine tuning” – and surely a lot of that frantic activity is simply people rehearsing and practising their delivery.
I know that I can always find a couple of details to adjust in any presentation I give – sometimes it’s just changing the wording to remove ambiguity, sometimes it’s changing a “build” or getting better balance into the visual impact.
I also recall one of my “how to think when troubleshooting” presentations getting a comment like “I didn’t want to see a random collection of thoughts that had been thrown together at the last minute”. In some respects this was good – because I’d gone to a great deal of effort to make the presentation look like a spontaneous bit of trouble-shooting. On the other hand, it had taken me a couple of days to create it! (Fortunately all the other evaluations were much better.)
Comment by Jonathan Lewis — July 20, 2009 @ 12:45 pm UTC Jul 20,2009 |