Room
In each talk room, a member of the PyCon Italia organizing committee (i.e., the Talk Manager) will assist and support speakers delivering their talks. Thus no worries about setting up the beamer, or tracking the time during the talk. The Talk Manager will be there just to help you.
Slides format and layout
While working on your slides, keep in mind that they’ll be displayed on a VGA projector, and that the target resolution is 1024x768 pixels.
As a rule of thumb, please don’t rely on color contrast in your slides; we will do our best to ensure that the projection quality will be as good as expected, but in doubt expect being stuck with a long VGA cable and/or an old projector killing most of the subtle shades in your presentation.
We would also like to suggest these guidelines about the accessibility https://www.w3.org/WAI/teach-advocate/accessible-presentations/. Sharing the slide with people or presenting a talk with this rules in mind could be meaningful for reaching out all the attendees.
Last but not least, there is no suggested PyCon Italia branding for you to put on your slides. You are free to choose your favorite template.
Slides backup
Every speaker must carry a removable storage with his/her presentation in PDF format during the talk, “just in case” something goes wrong and we have to resort to an emergency laptop.
Using PDF format is not mandatory, but you should use a format readable on an emergency laptop where [Open|Libre]Office won’t necessarily be installed. Slides in HTML format are fine too as long as you’ve tried them with major browsers.
If you don’t have an USB stick available, try to ask if there is one available at the conference desks.
So you really have no excuses not to have a backup of your slides with you ;)
Talk Managers
As PyCon Italia organizers, we care about you delivering your talk in the best possible way. That’s why we selected some of us to be the Talk Managers.
As you may already guess, the mission of a Talk Manager is to make everything running smoothly during your talk.
This includes:
- assist you the day before your presentation, by testing your laptop with the room’s projector;
- keeping track of time for you during your presentation: he/she will show you how much time you have left;
- moderating questions from the audience.
Laptop testing
Laptop and projectors don’t play well together. That’s why we enforce a rule of testing your laptop long before your presentation starts. This is the procedure:
- your Talk Manager will arrange a test on the same room and same projector you will be using;
- if your talk is the first day of the conference in the morning, the test will be arranged the same morning 15 minutes before the 1st talk;
- if your talk is in the morning, the test will be arranged the day before at ~7:30pm or in any case right after the last afternoon talk in that room;
- if your talk is in the afternoon, the test will be arranged the same day at 1:00pm or 1:15pm, right after the last morning talk in that room or in any case before the lunch break;
Beginners’ section
Slide guidelines
Least experienced speakers might be interested in guidelines about how many slides you should have in a presentation. As a generic rule guided by experience a 30 minutes slot corresponds to ~15 slides.
Remember however that slides are not your talk. They just serve as support for you and the audience. For example, you should never read your slides word-by-word: the audience will out-speed you and get bored before you’re finished.
Avoid doing this by simplifying your slides: instead of using complete sentences, use keywords, i.e.:
(Don’t)
- It’s important to remember closing the socket connection
- Otherwise, a crash will occur
(Do)
- Cleanup: close socket
Rehearsals
Especially if you are a beginner, you should rehearse your talk many times. Don’t trust your instincts about how much time you are going to spend on a particular slide!
Instead, arrange some rehearsals with colleagues/friends/spouses acting as your audience. It’s not necessary for them to have a technical background. Try to keep their attention: for example, their yawning will notify you that you’re wasting time over explaining a concept, and an unexpected question will notify you that you need to spend a little more time introducing that same concept.
At the end of each rehearsal, fix your slides immediately, so to deliver a better presentation the next time!
Voice tricks
Regardless of whether you’re using a microphone or not, when speaking in public you must talk louder than you do in a normal conversation.
It’s all about talking louder while keeping a natural voice. You can practice this by placing your audience at 3-4 meters while rehearsing. To have them understand you, you’ll have to talk slower and louder, which is also how you want to talk during your presentation.
