Earlier today I gave one of the opening keynotes at OSCON. It was 15 minutes long, and it was OK. While I didn’t consider it a bad talk, it wasn’t what I would consider my best work.

Immediately after the presentation I gave my second talk, which was 40 minutes long, and I was very happy with the results. A filled room of folks seemed to find the talk useful and there were plenty of questions. I did consider that some of my better work.

So in a nutshell, my 15 minute keynote felt OK and my 40 minute talk felt solid.

Something was bothering me much of the day about why this was.

My dissatisfaction was not with the execution of the keynote, I felt I was reasonably vibrant and articulate in the way I presented, but I was less happy with the content and the structure. It felt to me that not enough of the rubber hit the road.

I have been giving talks at conferences around the world for over twelve years. I have prided myself in striving to deliver useful content but wrapping it up in a loose and entertaining style, and providing plenty of anecdotes to identify with the audience. Twelve years in, I felt pretty confident that I had this presentation-business down pat. I felt like I had cut my teeth, paid my dues, and made all the mistakes I needed to make to get the art of delivering a solid presentation down.

I am an idiot.

As a bit of background, when I started preparing the content for my keynote, the content and the structure was something I really battled with. This was a different type of keynote; it was more along the lines of a lightning talk in terms of duration, but it had the gravitas of a keynote. It needed to be thought-provoking and set the stage for discussions elsewhere at OSCON. But I needed to do this in a short burst of time, and make it feel like an experience that people could identify with. I had my message; I believe that we are at the beginning of a renaissance in community management, but I found the shorter nature of the presentation and it’s position as a keynote really challenging, and more-so than I expected.

After delivering the keynote and in thinking about this and talking to some close friends, I came to some conclusions, and it is these conclusions that I wanted to share. If you are a presenter some of these thoughts might be useful in how you think about your own presentations too.

Firstly, my presentation style has always been story orientated; I build up a context, provide some tension in that context, and then deliver an outcome that strives to relieve the tension and provide insight. As such there is a certain amount of set up and context building that gets the audience up the curve, I then deliver the outcome and bring the audience back down over the curve and provide conclusions. This story-telling component takes time…valuable time in a short presentation.

Secondly, Steph Walli observed that there is a real skill in writing novels and a real but very different skill in writing short stories. I think this was really insightful. Short stories by definition need the story-telling to be more compact, and the finesse and skill is in delivering the same smooth set-up and transition of events, but with fewer keyframes thrown into the mix.

As such, my conclusion here is that I like to tell stories, and my presentations always comprise of telling stories, but my career so far has far been from the perspective of a novellist as opposed to a short-story writer. I believe this was illustrated today when my longer talk felt more natural and more me, yet the keynote felt personally more awkward, and less me. While I am confident in my skills in delivering a 30 or 40 minute presentation, I discovered today that delivering a shorter presentation that needs to have the same or greater level of gravitas requires a very different and distinctive set of skills, and I want to aquire them.

To be completely clear, none of this is at the fault of OSCON and O’Reilly, I have no issue with 15 minute keynotes, and they put on one heck of a great conference. Everyone has been so supportive and wonderful to me. I am delighted they gave me an opportunity to get up and speak and I feel even more grateful that my experience has now helped me to learn something new about myself, and a new area to focus, even after I had been down the presentation road so many times before and I thought I knew what I needed to know.

It turns out that this old dog still needs to learn some new tricks, and I am now switching gears to learn how to do this. Thoughts and advice all welcome!

I just wanted to let you good people of the Internet know that I will be delivering a brand new talk entitled Unwrapping The Community Manager at OSBC in San Francisco at 11.40am on Thu 18th March 2010.

In the presentation I will be deconstructing the role of community manager and discussing:

• who needs a community manager?
• what does the role involve?
• where should he/she report?
• what are requirements for improving the opportunity for success?
• what are the risks?

I will also be sharing my experiences working with Ubuntu and other organizations. I hope to see some of you there!

Last year I keynoted Ohio Linux Fest. For a number of years I had been building up to going along, but every time I was set to make plans another commitment got in the way of going. I talked about this in my new book:

Like many folks, I have had the good fortune and opportunity to do my fair share of travel to conferences as part of my work. As a result, I have been able to experience many of the conferences I once dreamed of attending, but there were still some I never quite had a chance to get to.

One such show was Ohio Linux Fest, a mid-sized community-run conference devoted to all things Linux and open source. I had always heard great things about the show from a member of my team and members of the community, but for some reason the Fates always conspired against me and I was busy every time the show was scheduled: I was either traveling, in meetings, on vacation, or otherwise unable to get out to Ohio. Back in early 2008, though, I received an email about the show inviting me to speak. Knowing full well that something was going to get in the way at some point in the future, I slam-dunked the dates into my calendar with a little note next to them:

MAKE IT HAPPEN THIS TIME.

I responded to the email expressing interest, and the organizers kindly offered me the keynote speech. Somewhat flattered at the invitation, I happily accepted.

I wish I had done the same this year. I was all set to go along but unfortunately I am not going to be able to attend. This is not because it is anything less than an awesome show, in fact it is in my list of shows that I prioritize to get along to each year, but unfortunately circumstances mean that I am busy that weekend.

So instead I just wanted to encourage you good people to go along. It is well thought out, well structured, has great content, great exhibitors, and with the exception of one of the organizers mis-intentionally planting a boot in the wedding vegetables, I had a fun and productive time at the show.

So, go here to check it out and be in Ohio on from 25th – 27th Sep. Rock and roll!

Also, a few weeks back I recorded a video going through the different stages with my ultra-low-tech approach to slides. You can watch it here – this should give you a gist of the talk and the core information in it.

Remember, the solution to burnout is to keep an eye out for each other in our communities. I got your back, dude!

A while back I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. Well, I think it is time for lil’ update on what is shaping up to be a rocking event.

The aim of the summit is get community managers, leaders and organizers together to discuss, debate and share ideas on building great community in a vendor-neutral environment. The event is entirely free (although I ask everyone to go and register and it takes place the weekend immediately before OSCON, in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Details of how to get there are here.

Since I announced the event, the response has been stunning and over 150 people have registered with a fantastic and diverse range of contributors signed up to attend. You can see this awesome list of attendees here.

The the aim and purpose of the event to provide an open, transparent and vendor-neutral environment for discussion, and I have been really keen to make sure this is an unconference (an event in which an empty schedule is available at the start of the event, and attendees can go and add topics). The reason for this is to ensure the sessions are as diverse as possible and not merely what I think we should discuss. The openness of the scheduling means that anyone can add a session that they think would be of interest to the other attendees.

If you are coming along and interested in running a session, feel free to discuss it on this wiki page with the other attendees: you may find some other people who would like to help with the session. Speaking of the wiki, we also have rideshare, roomshare and other pages springing up to make attending the event as easy and enjoyable as possible.

I have another update on the event half-penned, but I will send that over in the coming week. Stay tuned, and go and register! I hope to see you there!

I will also be fielding your community questions in the video cast: you can ask them in the chat channel that is on that page. Hope to see you there!

Just a quick message to let you all know that today I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 on the 18th and 19th July 2009 in San Jose, California. The event takes place the weekend before OSCON in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities.

The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more.

The event is very much a summit: it’s primary focus is around discussion. It will be run in the style of an unconference; a clear and open schedule in which attendees can volunteer sessions and engage with other attendees. This will ensure the summit packs in a healthy chunk of diversity, covering a wide range of topics and perspectives. In addition to the discussions the summit will feature some scheduled presentations, panel discussions and social events.

The event is entirely free, but you need to pre-register here. You can read more about the event at www.communityleadershipsummit.com.

In its first day day many community managers have signed up to attend such as Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier (OpenSuSE Community Manager – Novell), Dave Neary (GNOME Foundation Board Member – Neary Consulting), Brian Proffitt (Community Manager – Linux Foundation), David “Lefty” Schlesinger (Linux Foundation Mobile Advisory Board, GNOME Foundation), Karsten Wade – (Fedora Community Leader – Red Hat) and John Mark Walker (Community Manager – Collab.net). Rock and roll.

Some real quick links before I get back to the grind-stone:

• I recently did two interviews, one with OSTATIC and one with LinuxQuestions.
• Now is the time to start getting your Jaunty Release Party organized! See the current list of parties here and find out how to organize your own here!
• UDS Sponsorship results will be forthcoming over the next week or so.
• I will be participating in a panel at the Linux Collaboration Summit from the 8th – 10th April.

And quick thoughts:

• Snow-mobiling is incredible fun. Tahoe is beautiful.
• I am back in England and in London from the 19th – 25th April. Fancy meeting up?
• Jaunty is rocking. Upgrade and report bugs!
• Brainstorm report to focus ideas around Karmic is coming. Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase results are coming!

Some of you will be familiar with how utterly plastered my previous laptop was. Now that the poor blighter has been decommissioned, I need to claw back some laptop credibility and get this fella up to par. If any of you are going to SCALE and have some cool stickers you want to lob in my general direction, that would be wonderful!

I know where I will be. I will be speaking at the always excellent SoCal Linux Expo in Los Angeles. There I will be delivering my talk Building Belonging, exploring the underlying recipe behind behind what makes great community and babbling on about many of the concepts that my team have used as part of the Ubuntu community. The presentation takes a fun and anecdote laden tour-de-force of community in a way that any community can implement. Be there or be square!

SCALE is a fantastic conference and well worth the trip to the city of angels. I am looking forward to seeing everyone there again!