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)

Thank you for volunteering. Please subscribe to the PGCon Volunteers
list: http://lists.pgcon.org/mailman/listinfo/pgcon-volunteers

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