Re: PGCon 2008 RFP

On Dec 29, 2008, at 8:40 PM, Greg Smith wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Dec 2008, Dan Langille wrote:
>
>> If we have enough volunteers:  speakers will be accosted in the
>> lecture hall just before their talk.  The attacker will have a USB
>> drive and will not let the presenter speak until they supply a copy
>> of the slides.
>
> I think some speakers might be uncomfortable with their slides going
> out to the world at large before they've even presented them.
> People pay more attention to the talk if they haven't seen the
> slides beforehand, and there's plenty of amusing speakers you
> wouldn't want to ruin the live presentation of that way.  Being
> accosted by random people can be disconcerting as well.

Greg: The speakers will know in advance that request will be
forthcoming.  In addition, uploading to the website != public.  Papers
get uploaded to http://papers.pgcon.org/ and then are published to http://pgcon.org/
  at some later point in time.  It's all part of Pentabarf (http://pentabarf.org
).

> What might make sense is to have an official list of organizer
> deputies authorized to collect a copy of the slides as part of the
> setup/teardown of each talk.  If the presenter knew that giving a
> copy to someone on that list relieved them of needing to submit them
> later (and made for easy deflection of individual requests), and
> that the slides would be posted promptly just after the presentation
> itself (but not before), I think that could play out well on both
> sides.

They probably won't be available until after the conference.  As for a
list, the speaker will have no way of verifying that a given person is
on that list without presenting ID.   Let's keep it simple. These
aren't state secrets.

> I would volunteer to fill that role for any talk I attend.  Unless
> you do something crazy that would ruin my chances of coming at all,
> like requiring standardized slides without providing a LaTeX
> template. (Robert mentioned OSCON:  they provide templates in
> PowerPoint/Keynote/HTML format to aid presenters, but they do not
> require their use)


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--
Dan Langille
http://langille.org/