Round Table Discussion June 28, 2022

- Introduction
- Who’s the audience?
  - What is the roadmap for this talk?
  - Let the audience know what they will know that they didn't know when they joined the talk.
  - Set slides to go from beginning through advanced and slow it down if you lose your audience.
  - When doing a presentation, make it so that 80% of your audience understands everything that you are talking about

- How technical is too technical?
- Interactive - make the audience do stuff
  - Polling the audience
    - Mentimeter
    - Slido
    - breakout room with homework
    - casual ice breakers

- - Quiz the audience
  - Tools/platform to use
- Software demos
  - Have a plan b and maybe a plan c, too
    - Why? There might be network problems, or the system might go down unexpectedly, etc.
    - What kind?
      - Record a screen-capture video of the demo and/or make slides with images/video clips.
      - Have a build of the system running on your local machine.
  - Use real/realistic data, with permission, and explain what they are/where they come from
    - Why?
      - Users who know the domain might be distracted by/concerned about quirks in fake data. This can lead to questions that eat into the presentation time, etc., or confusion about how the software works.
      - If using real data, it's important to acknowledge the efforts of the data providers and honor their concerns about how and when data are shared.
      - Some understanding of the data might be important context for the audience trying to follow the software demo.
  - Step through real workflows, explaining what the user is trying to accomplish, instead of jumping around from feature to feature
    - Why?
      - The full breadth and depth of an application might be overwhelming to an audience that hasn't seen it before.
      - The audience might not understand the use cases until they're explained.
      - Stepping through real workflows helps to explain use cases, engage the audience's curiosity (e.g., by presenting a research question and then pursuing its answer in the software), and provide opportunities to show features and explain software design decisions.
  - Clarify which things are placeholders/previews/not done yet
    - Why?
      - For the sake of transparency, so the audience isn't mislead into thinking that a placeholder represents completed work.
      - To preempt audience questions/concerns/objections about areas that haven't been fully designed or developed.
      - To explain plans for enhancements.
  - tips
    - have usb or another copy somewhere (google drive?)
    - do not assume you are presenting from your own machine
    - browser might be different
    - powerpoint may perform differently on different machine; font especially might change PDF might works better
- Recap
  - bullet points highlight
  - questions slides at the end

Slides design
- Template?
  - what presenters are expecting
  - NCSA template? https://internal.ncsa.illinois.edu/comm/NCSA_Template_16x9.potx
  - SD standard template?
  - be careful when copying content between templates
- Style?
  - no busy background
  - contrast! projection might be bad
- Font?
- Animation?
  - if you can use hand gesture animation would be very beneficial
  - get a laser pointer if available
  - only use animation when necessary; draw people's attention to the right place
  - if over zoom, consider network speed
- Figures?
  - have one main image per slide
- How much text is too much text?
  - one point per slide
  - don't put a wall of text
  - if you put down the text, you'd better use them
  - Bullet point?
    - 3 to 4 bullet points each slide
    - the rule of 3?? public speaking. example of 3 resonates better with people
- Ted talks are good examples

Presentation

- Speak a lot
  - present in a conversational way. practice
- Pause
  - audience might be waiting for what you are trying to say
- Answering questions
  - If there is no microphone, repeat the questions back into the microphone you are holding or speaking into. Question time is a lot more beneficial if those in the audience can hear both the question and answer.
  - What to say if you cannot answer a specific question
    - ask them to stop by later or connect the person with some one who knows
    - say "great question"
    - short concise answer
    - keep an eye on the time
- Practices
  - Don’t over think
  - Film/record yourself
  - Venues to practice
    - toast master - world wide organization https://www.toastmasters.org
    - Group meetings
    - SD lightning talks
  - overcome stage fright
    - keep doing it!
    - easy slides at the beginning
  - time yourself to make sure you are on time

Miscellaneous tips I found online

Live code only if absolutely necessary to make your point. Include some humor when things momentarily didn’t work as expected
Have a short, easy to remember URL link to the relevant resources
Put your contact info and links on every slide especially if your screen name is not your real name
Don't fall in love with your slides: similar to jokes and ideas, you may make some truly beautiful, awesome, epic slides that absolutely do not belong in your story. It’s hard but resist the urge to keep things because they look cool or because you worked hard on them
Test the AV to avoid issues
Use special word to cue the audiences. E.g. We are nearly at the end of this session. A simple yet powerful statement that can wake up your audience.
After the talk
- Stick around and chat with your audiences
- Thank the organizer

Links mentioned in this Round Table:

If you are interested in contributing to a Round Table, please see these links:

Round Table Discussions

SWG Topics For Discussion

https://internal.ncsa.illinois.edu/comm/NCSA_Template_16x9.potx

Space shortcuts

Page tree

Open discussions on specific topics selected by the Software Working Group and selected from the list of SWG Topics For Discussion.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022 moderated by Chen Wang

Discussion Outlines:

Slides design

Presentation

Miscellaneous tips I found online