Of Presenting and the Evidence

So that's the main part of the week over then. On Wednesday I chaired our Data Protection Conference in Dublin which was a howling success. I then shot up the motorway to present at the Business in the Community Engage to Innovate Conference at W5. The first of my two presentations was filmed to be published I'm told on the Internet next week.

The added challenge in presenting nowadays is that you have to be really careful in terms of the every day examples you use to support the points you make. In the good old days of presenting pre the advent of mobile phones and the Internet you could refer to all sort of incidents and people knowing you'd get away with it as long as they weren't in the room with you and you didn't use their names. Nowadays, what you say could be tweated around the world. Phone video clips of you could be sent out of the room on their way to anywhere and everywhere before you've even finished your gig. The whole thing might even be kept for posterity on a web site somewhere for others (including your former bad boss, manager, teacher) to find at any point in the future.
I think my presentations went well but it's really difficult to know. People are always too polite to give honest feedback. They might say they loved a presentation and afterwards tell their mates that it was a waste of time. I've done it myself once or twice. So I've developed my own measurement system and it works like this. It was a reasonably successful if :

* No-one nodded off
* No-one left before the end;

* No-one got on their damn handhelds and started texting or fiddling with emails during your presentation;