Hey Speakers, would be interested in your opinion on this blog article.

[Tim Cunningham]

http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/10/29/the-problem-with-tech-conference-talks-lately/

The problem with tech conference talks lately

Posted at October 29, 2013 07:00 am by Nicholas C. Zakas

Tags: Conferences, Speaking

I’ve spoken at my fair share of conferences over the years, and I used to get very excited about attending them. Lately, though, I’ve found myself more disappointed in conferences on a more frequent basis. Leaving aside the social aspects that have been increasingly under fire, I’d like to focus my attention squarely on the very thing that attracts people to conferences in the first place: the talks.

In my opinion, the quality of talks at many conferences has been dropping precipitously. This has little to do with the quality of speakers. There are some fantastic speakers who give incredibly mundane talks. There are some lousy speakers who give talks that are full of high-quality information. There are experienced speakers who end up speaking based on past excellent talks and fail to deliver. There are inexperienced speakers who knock it out of the park on the first try. The speakers aren’t actually the problem, it’s the content they produce.

Balancing conference schedules

Not all conference talks are of the same type. In general, I break down conference talks into several categories:

• Instructional – teaches a topic
• Case Study – explains a real-life implementation and its outcome
• Inspirational – makes you think about something differently
• Advertisement – introduces a product/library/framework/etc.

My preference is for conferences to be composed primarily of instructional and case study talks, roughly in equal portions (though I would love there to be slightly more case studies). The inspirational talks are usually reserved for opening and closing keynotes. The three other types of talks can form a really nice conference schedule when used appropriately. It’s the last one, advertisements, that are the problem.

Advertisement talks

Advertisement talks aren’t necessarily given by conference sponsors, though that is not uncommon. The purpose of an advertisement talk is to introduce you to a product in which the speaker has a vested interest. That means you could be introducing a new open source project you created, or a company could be introducing a new enterprise-grade storage solution, or an evangelist is going over a company’s API. All of these fall into the category of advertisement because the value to you is secondary to getting the message out about the product.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think all advertisement talks are bad and should be eliminated. My problem is that they now seem to represent the overwhelming majority of conference talks. The tech community has somewhat brought this on ourselves with our ravenous appetite for all things new and shiny. We’ve made celebrities out of John Resig and Jeremy Ashkenas for creating jQuery and Backbone, respectively. These are two very smart guys who have done amazing things for the web development community, and now everyone with an open source project and an idea is shooting for that level of popularity.

I see conference talks filled up with people who are presenting their new “awesome” project that will “totally blow your mind.” Only problem is that no one is using it yet, or it’s not even finished, or it’s version 0.0.1 so it would be foolish for you to even attempt to use it at this point. Here’s the thing: there is no value to me, as an audience member, if you’re talking about an unproven tool, framework, or library. I’m not going to risk my product on your unproven technology, I’m going to wait for someone else to do it.

Once again, I’m not proposing that conferences ban all advertisement talks. What I am proposing is that they be severely limited in their number. Keep the sponsored talks that you must, but let’s put a lid on the number of people talking about fledgling projects without any real world use cases.

Case study talks

These types of talks are, by far, the best to have at a conference. A case study talk takes you through an actual real world implementation of something. Case study talks can be a mixture of instructional and advertisement, but the value is that you get actual data and insights. What turns an advertisement talk into a case study talk? Compare:

“Introducing AbdominalRegion for Backbone.js”

vs.

“How we used AbdominalRegion for Backbone.js to decrease page load time by 50%”

The first talk title is a talk I will likely skip. Why would I care about this new tool you wrote? In the second talk title, I’m very interested in decreasing page load time for my Backbone.js application, and I’m very interested in anything that can help me do it.

Just like that, an advertisement talk that does nothing but promote your own project turns into a useful talk that also happens to talk about your own project. It’s the real world implications and uses of the project that make it compelling to an audience that is hungry to improve their products. I really don’t care if you have an MVC framework that you think is better than anything out there; I do care if your MVC framework can solve a problem I’m actually dealing with.

Most of my talks over the years have been case studies, and I like to think that’s part of why they’ve been well-received. I take my experience building large-scale applications (and last year, consulting for large companies) and put that experience into my talks. I want to help people solve problems they’re actually facing.

Tutorial talks also benefit from a case study treatment. Instead of telling me about how prototypes work in JavaScript, show me how using prototypes will make something I’m doing easier. Instead of walking through APIs for WebRTC, show me how to embed video chat into my product. All talks are instantly made better by applying the topic to a real-world situation that the audience may be dealing with.

And don’t forget to include the downsides in your case studies: the things you messed up, the problems you ran into, and what you learned from the whole process. Everyone improves when we share our experiences honestly.

If I were a conference organizer, I would be sure upwards of 80% of the talks were case studies. These types of talks provide the highest value to the audience and should be the focal point of any good conference.

A note for new project authors

At this point you may be thinking, “but if I can’t submit talks about my awesome project, how will people know how awesome it is?” The reason jQuery and Backbone.js became popular had nothing to do with John and Jeremy plastering the conference scene with talks. They became popular because they are good tools that helped people solve real problems. The popularity grew organically as more people found them useful. There was no grand marketing campaign.

The best thing you can do for your project is to use it in a real world situation and try it out. You probably started the project to solve some problem – now use it to see if the problem was solved. Next, show it to a few friends you trust. Ask them to try it out. See if they have any feedback.

For example, I started ESLint because I needed a JavaScript linter that had pluggable rules. I hacked something together one weekend and then started showing it to a few friends. I’ve yet to give a talk about it but people are finding it useful and contributing code.

After you get some good feedback, start attending local meetups. Those are good places to share what you’ve been working on and gather even more feedback from people who are thinking about similar problems. See if you can get a few more people to look at your project and try it out.

Once a few people have been using it and you’ve been incorporating feedback, you’ll have a good amount of real-world information about it’s use and what problems it can solve. At that point, by all means, start going to conferences and sharing what you know.

It’s about the content

All conferences begin and end with the content they provide in the form of talks. We need less pure instructional and advertisement talks and more case studies. As you’re filling out your talk proposals for 2014, think long and hard about what type of talk you’re proposing. Almost any talk can be augmented with real-world information to make it a case study. We all have interesting work experiences, think about sharing more of those and less about the open source project you’re hacking on during the weekends. Let’s flood conferences with so many high quality case studies that there are no “filler” talks.

If you’re a conference organizer, raise your bar in 2014. Limit the number of talks that “introduce” a new tool. Encourage those presenters to submit a case study showing how their new tool helped solve an actual problem. Ask those who submit tutorial talks to include a real-world use case or explain how the tips and techniques affect developers every day.

If you’re a conference attendee, tells the organizers what you want. You don’t want to be fed talk after talk about weekend side projects. You want quality. You want something that helps you do your job better. You want fewer talks that are thinly veiled advertisements for a company or product. You want quality, useful information.

Together, we can create conferences that aren’t just great social events, but also great learning events. The technical community has faced such a wide array of challenges and solved problems in interesting ways – we can all benefit from those experiences if we talk about them. Not all that is shiny is good, sometimes you just need a novel approach to using the tools you’re familiar with to make a big difference.

Let’s all agree to make a difference by sharing our experiences.

[Adam Tuttle]

I don't think he's too far off. I also don't think the CFML conference circuit suffers greatly from this problem. 

There are a few "introducing ..." topics, but they are in the minority. Most of the "getting started with x" topics tend to be well established projects like ColdSpring or ColdBox or FW/1... The CFML community isn't moving at the same pace as the JS community. It seems like there are at least a dozen new "amazing" JS frameworks every week. We might see a dozen big new CFML frameworks/libraries every 3-6 months.

It has made me think about the topics I tend to propose, and may affect my future proposals, but overall I don't think we're a major offender, here.

Adam

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[Jason Dean]

Personally, I have always hated case studies. I want instruction on how something is intended to be done, not how *you* did it. Perhaps I am not good at extrapolating the information of one implementation into how I should do it, but in my experiences case-studies rarely align with what I need and tend to be too specific to the implementers needs. 

The example in the article is "How we used AbdominalRegion for Backbone.js to decrease page load time by 50%", but in my experience, this type of talk turns into: "How we used AbdominalRegion for Backbone.js along with X, Y, Z, and some plugin to decrease load time by 50% (where things were really 100% slower than they should have been before). Do we really solve problems with one solution?  Or is it usually a collection of solutions where if one piece didn't exist, then things might be completely different?  

Even something as simple as "How we used FW/1 with Dojo to increase customer satisfaction rates" I would be hesitant to go to. I use FW/1 and would love to know how I can use it to increase customer satisfaction, but I use jQuery in my app and don't want to deal with adding Dojo as well. I might still go, hoping that most of the solution is in FW/1 and that I could extrapolate the dojo stuff to jQuery, but I would not be hopeful and would likely attend Intro to XXXX instead if it was at the same time. 

Case studies are too subjective, too relative to the presenter, not the audience. A presentation about how to use Angular is appealing to me.  A presentation about how Joe Pudslipowski (name I made up) used Angular with Node, grunt, and Ruby scripts to implement some application that is nothing like what I am doing is not of interest to me; it only has part of what I am looking for. 

Certainly there is room at any conference for presentations of different types for different types of learners. I am not saying there shouldn't be case studies, I am saying that they are not better than instructional. For me, they cannot replace instructional as Mr. Zakas seems to suggest. 

If some of our speakers want to take the case study approach, I will not argue. But I will certainly not "Encourage those presenters to submit a case study..." instead. 

Jason

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[Raymond Camden]

I'm probably the exact opposite of Jason. I love case studies even if they use a tool I'm not using - heck - especially if so. I look at it as a 'freebie' on top of the main content. 

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Tim Cunningham <timcunn...@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/10/29/the-problem-with-tech-conference-talks-lately/

The problem with tech conference talks lately

Posted at October 29, 2013 07:00 am by Nicholas C. Zakas

Tags: Conferences, Speaking

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===========================================================================
Raymond Camden, Adobe Developer Evangelist

Email : raymon...@gmail.com
Blog : www.raymondcamden.com
Twitter: cfjedimaster

[Jason Dean]

>> I'm probably the exact opposite of Jason.

No one asked you!!  Except Tim.  I guess he asked you.  

>>  I love case studies

No one cares what you think!  Well... except probably everyone. Including me. 

Hope things are going well,

Jason

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[Tim Cunningham]

Jason and I had a spirited discussion on another forum about this, and I came to realize that people have very different view of what a "Case Study" is.  I brought up this topic because I felt I had never seen a case study at a ColdFusion conference.  Jason made a rather convincing argument that  I *personally* had delivered a case study both at cf.Objective() 2013 and NCDevcon 2013!! 

The difference is our view of what a Case Study is. I have attended case studies from Citrix and VMWare  they follow a very similar pattern this article is pretty good on describing the things that make up a case study: http://uakinci.xomba.com/technical_writing_how_to_write_a_case_study it is from a writing point of view rather than a presentation point of view but the principles are sound.. I am looking for a better article.  Jason made a very good point that my Version Control on the Database: The Final Frontier was indeed a case study.  I didn't think of it that way, but it certainly had case study aspects to it. 

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[Tim Cunningham]

Also note: I totally disagree with the author of the article that tech conferences should have 80% of their content be case studies.. that may work when your audience is a bunch of executives, developers are fine with just dealing with theory. But do feel that this is an area that is under represented at CF conferences.  CFSummit pulled a very diverse crowd, I talked to almost 20 people who were not developers at all One guy was a CTO of an insurance company! (Yes, I made the $ale) , others were managers, Project Leads, QA people, if we keep pulling people like that it may be helpful to have content geared toward them (not a lot though they are probably there just to gamble anyway)

Tim

[Raymond Camden]

Tim, thanks for sharing that (about the audience) - that is cool to hear.

[Jason Dean]

It is my opinion that both the author of the article and myself, and probably most conference attendees see the difference between instructional and case study as this:

Instructional: Here's how you do it

Case Study: Here's how I did it

I think the point that the author was trying to make, and the reason that many see value is case studies is that many in the audience want to know that the solutions being touted do, in fact, work. A case study is seeing as more convincing evidence that the solution works. I can't argue with that logic; still doesn't make me like them.

I don't think that the author is trying to promote that 80% of content be those boring case-study webinars that I get emails about almost daily from VMWare and other things.  Those are sales tools and are targeted toward suit-wearing, executive bureaucrats (like you, Tim). The kinds of case studies I believe he is talking about, and the kind I am talking about are sessions from practitioners showing how they solved their problems using Tools X, Y and Z. 

Jason

[Tim Cunningham]

Jason,

I think you summed up the optimal position for Case Study for an audience like ours. I quote you (with your permission) "Perhaps Optimal: Here's how it is generally done. Here's how I did it in the real world. Why I may have done it differently. "

I think that type of talk has great value, it is a hybrid of a pure Case study and the Instructional. The people (like me)  that pay for and send developers for conferences do so in the hopes that their people will come back and be able to solve current and future problems the company faces that they otherwise would have struggled with if they had not attended the conference.  So many topics show very impractical demos to demonstrate some cool new feature or method. That is great, but your boss wants to know how that feature makes them more profitable or efficient or their life easier or all of the above. If the audience can go back to work and say to their boss, I know we were thinking about using tech X, but if we do that here are some things we need to consider because company Y tried that and found out that tech X was good for about 80% of the job, but to get things truly done, they had to also use tech x,y, and z. Do you know what a gold mine that is for a manager?

I am not saying every talk should be like that.. just I think we need more of that. More of the optimal kind that Jason was talking about. Because Jason is awesome.