Jonah,
> Well, how many DB2 or Oracle conferences have you attended? The
> industry conferences (even those given by the user groups) are
> different than open source conferences, that's for sure. Of course,
> you're paying a helluva lot more to attend any of those than you are
> PGCon... so maybe they just have higher expectations?
Or more much lower ones, because they know people are being paid to attend.
I attended a number of industry conferencences for Sun (Sun, Oracle,
IBM, various Java companies). And I can tell you, I would *never* in a
million years have paid to sit in one single presentation I attended.
Even when the subject matter was personally interesting to me, the
presentation style was like waiting for pitch to drip. And, looking
around, 90% of the attendees were doing their e-mail and never even
looked at the speaker.
Standardized slide templates contributed significantly to the boredom.
"What presentation am I in again? Is this Scaling J2EE Servers, or Web
Security? Haven't I seen this slide before?"
I successfully fought the JavaOne committee last year *not* to use the
JavaOne template because it interfered with my delivery. The result?
My presentation was voted #2 or #3 in the conference overall (out of >
200), even though it had no real Java content.
OSCON, the hardest-to-get-into OSS conference in the English speaking
world, offers "OSCON" slide templates. But we don't force or even
harass people to use them; we prefer speakers with their own distinctive
style.
It's my assertion that people who promote the use of standard slide
templates do so because they don't know how to put together a good
presentation themselves. Heck, some really good presentations use *no
slides at all*.
--Josh Berkus
