Conferences are awesome. Here's how to keep them awesome.
-
An audience: People to communicate the ideas we have to.
-
A venue: A place we can do the communication in.
-
A projector: Some of us are kind of scared to give talks without them.
-
Q & A session: One reason we give talks is not that we know everything, but that we need to learn more. Giving a talk helps with that, but so does Q & A.
-
A place to do lunch: We're not prisoners of war, you do not need to provide us with food. We are happy to buy our own food. But having it with other attendees is great. RubyKaigi 2011 organized "anti-bocchi" lunches so people didn't have to eat alone. I took full advantage of that, having lunch at ramen shops with Japanese programmers. I was always the last one to finish because I was so busy talking. That, and I was bad at using chopsticks!
-
Translation: Some of us would feel a little bit silly giving a talk that wasn't in the native language of the country the conference is in, without any subtitles.
Andrew Grimm has spoken at RubyKaigi 2011, will speak at Sapporo RubyKaigi 2012, and at more Ruby On Rails Oceania meetups and Railscamps than he can remember.
He has never been a keynote speaker. He uses OpenOffice Impress instead.