For Speakers

By now you’re heavily into crafting your presentation for the IA summit (or at the very least you’re vaguely remembering you signed up to speak in front of hundreds of your peers). To assist you we’ve included a few pieces of information about logistics, some links for presentation tips, and hopefully some good suggestions about getting to know your audience.

Logistics

• Promote your session! Getting people interested in your session is more than just writing a good title and abstract – if you have a blog, write about it – tell people you’re speaking! (use the “speaking badge” to the right if you’d like).

• Each session will be assigned a volunteer facilitator who will assist you with setting up in the room prior to your presentation. He/She will then call the room to order and introduce you as well as help with the flow of questions and timekeeping at the end.

• Regular sessions are 45 minutes (panels are 90 minutes) and we recommend that presentations should be timed for 30 - 35 minutes to allow for introductions and for questions. Please communicate to the session facilitator whether you would like questions raised throughout or held until the end so that they can instruct the audience appropriately during the introduction.

• Feedback from past summits has taught us that the few minutes at the end of the session is never enough for your audience to ask questions and meet you. This year we have created a dedicated “discussion lounge” close to the session rooms – once time has run out the facilitator will announce the end of the session and inform the audience that you will be available in the discussion lounge for further questions (the facilitator will check with you that you'll be available).

Presentation Tips

As a presenter at the IA Summit you are going to be faced with a challenge that many speakers at other conferences do not experience … a room full of people who deal with “design” and “communication” problems for a living. Don’t fall into the “The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot” trap.

Here are a few places that offer some presentation insights.

• If you can, try and make some connection to the Experiencing Information theme.
• Your choice of presentation style depends a lot on your personality but here are some things you may want to consider:
  • 7 Reasons Speakers Flop
  • Top ten delivery tips
  • Developing and delivering your speech
  • Death by Power Point

Your Audience is at Your Fingertips

You have an unbelievable opportunity this year to get your audience to help shape your presentation. Using our social networking site, CrowdVine, you can connect to those who will be attending the summit. We encourage you to use CrowdVine as a tool to understand your audience better, ask them specific questions or promote a discussion on your topic so it can inform your presentation.

As long as we’re talking about CrowdVine, all speakers have been automatically uploaded and you should have received an introductory email, so if you’ve haven’t already done so – please go in and add your photo and fill out your profile!

What’s Next

Make sure you are registered for the conference – this does not happen automatically. If you are the recipient of the complimentary registration (the primary point of contact listed in the proposal submission system – unless you’ve told us otherwise) do not select a price option on the registration form and instead enter “free” in the membership number field. If you’re an additional speaker or panel member you should use the “additional speaker” selection.

We’ll be following up with another email or two with some logistics details closer to the summit and when the draft schedule is created in early March we’ll be sending it out to speakers before we publish it.