Wellington Perl Mongers had a fun evening last week - our annual Lightning Talk meeting. As usual the talk schedule was looking pretty thin in the days leading up to the event but with a bit of encouragement people did step up and the evening went well. The talks covered a range of Perl modules; a bit on Erlang and CouchDB (thanks Lenz); mountain biking and mapping (Donovan); and Perl on the iPhone (Tobi). We even got to see the beginnings of Matt's robot army (doesn't look like we have anything to fear yet) and Srdjan gave us his sermon entitled "If statements considered harmful". I asked Matt to take some photos. The lighting wasn't great so not many came out but here's a montage.
As a group, it's clear that there's one key thing we can all do to improve our delivery - turn and face the audience. The one exception pictured is the guy speaking without slides.
Cross-posted from my blog
You're all in good company. I once considered doing a similar montage of speakers at YAPCs. There was one year when most of the photos I took were of the speaker looking at the screen. It's one reason I try and sit at the front to one side, so that when they do turn and face the screen now, at least they're facing me
I know I used to do it, but made a concious effort to stop it and look at the audience. Damian does a really good talk on presenting, and provides some great hints and tips. It must be online somewhere and it really is worth hunting for. Talking to the audience is one of the things he mentions too.
Actually it might be fun to do a montage one year and have an end of year quiz of 'Guess The Speaker'
