SCaLE 16x Open Data Presentation: not really happy

Giving my SCaLE 16x talk. Photo by Lisa Sweeney

I wish I could say I was really happy with the way my presentation went. But I’m not.

I think it would be an understatement to say I was a bit nervous and feeling a bit unprepared. Also, I began thinking in the hours before the presentation that I had really gone too negative in what I was going to say. While it was meant to be a “lessons learned” talk, there were lots of good things that I could have mentioned as well, and far more outside examples of success that I could have used to illustrate what we could have done better. I was able to fix some of this in the hours leading up to the talk, but still started out feeling like it wasn’t really the talk I wanted to give.

Also, it’s the first time I’ve addressed something bigger than a mid-sized meetup. While there were not actually more people present than I’m used to, the notion of being a speaker at a major conference kind of spooked me.

I got good feedback on the content if not the delivery, and some additional feedback about how to improve. So I think I’ll rework it and try again. Maybe at All Things Open later this year. I’ll also make sure to practice more in advance so my delivery is more natural, more dynamic and more polished.

Fortunately, my lightning talk went much better. See next post.


Slides are at: https://github.com/michaelgat/Presentations/blob/master/SCaLE16x_Open_Data.pdf
Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWwzaOVyqk at approximately the 6:45 mark.