Chris Brogan has put together a nice to-do list on how to start speaking at events and there’s some great information in there (some of which I am not doing yet, but will start soon).

Right now I am a “international developer evangelist” which is a nice title but sadly enough does not come with Q gadgets like Bond or a private jet like Iron Man. What it means is that I spend most of my days looking at what my company is doing and how it would matter for the outside world and to see what the world is doing to feed back to the people too busy in the company to have a look around themselves. In between I am translating these from one language and interest to another by creating easy-to-grasp examples and show improvements that can be done. And of course go out there and give lots and lots of presentations (last week I had 3 days in 2 countries with 7 presentations and 2 media interviews).

It is a sweet gig, and I am happy that I arrived at it after being a developer for a long time battling both the technologies of the web (and their creative implementations in browsers) and the internal hierarchies and politics of the company that pays your wage.

This does not really stop when you go into a speaking role though, if anything, the politics become even more problematic:

• Event organizers are less likely to pay you or your expenses when you work for a large company. Surely the company is happy to dedicate its time and money to support some random event someone else does make money with, right?
• Your colleagues are likely to constantly nag you that you are not coding any more and are just a speaker or front man now. This is sad and can be terribly annoying and a lot of people should not be surprised that you drift apart over the month as the job of a public figure is tiring and means a lot of work. Hearing that you do nothing is not very encouraging and does make you feel like you’re wasting your time.
• Marketing, PR and HR will be all over you to either march along with them for the good cause (which in a lot of times is directly in the opposite direction of yours) or keep a very close eye on you so that you don’t do anything silly in public that could harm the company.
• Random people will come to you with a very specific agenda and try to convince you that this is what the world needs to hear about.

In general, I am trying my best to walk the very narrow path of being an “evangelist” and not losing touch with what is being done in the company and the market. My own mental checklist is:

• It is not about you. You have a knack of speaking and explaining but if you really think you are a rockstar or people should read about you and your life, get one. This is a very small community with a very specific market that is not even defined properly yet.
• Do not overpromise. If you don’t believe in something or you are not sure if it really works, try it first and make sure. Come from a base of confidence not “woohoo this is sooo coool”
• Give people things to take away. This is my pet peeve about presentations. If there is nothing in there I can bring back and impress my boss with or make my life a lot easier, what was the point? Yes this is terribly pragmatic, but I am just not easy to get interested in theories or visionary speeches – I’ve seen too many be totally off the mark.
• Speak the language of the audience. Is the level of complexity the right one for the audience? Are they native speakers? Will pop references and jokes work?
• Find something new for yourself. Even if you’ve given dozens of talks about the topic, make sure to get a new, fresh angle that challenges you and the audience alike.
• Do your research. There’s nothing better than referencing other good examples and articles for people to read on about the topic.
• Have your handouts ready. Don’t just promise availability of your talk and examples, have them online and as a link to download before you even start.
• Go into sponge mode. The people you are about to talk to are even more interesting than you are. Chat, listen, invite to communicate, ask for things to look at and you’ll get a lot of inspiration for the next gig.

This works quite well for me and if you are interested, I can go on about planning your trips and what to make sure before you go in another post. Should I?

Chris

Other speaking tips:

• Speaking at alltop
• Make me a speaker – we should revamp this idea – I know

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Let’s all go Squirrel Fishing
• A Chiptune Christmas Album for free 8 bit Jesus
• Having inspired someone immensely to use Yahoo Pipes at GeekMeet in Sweden
• Seeing that annoying crowds in public transport can become beautiful, spooky clouds when shot with the right camera
• A full list of references and samples used in Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique – someone really researched there!
• Microsoft releasing a t-shirt series called softwear goes in the WTF category
• A very clean and well coded DHTML snowstorm by Scott Schiller – who says we cannot upgrade useless 1997 effects?
• Valleywag defining ‘Irony’ by wondering and complaining that all the news media is overly involved with the Yahoo layoffs. Wait, if we were to delete all blog posts mentioning Yahoo from your DB, what would be left?

Just got this sent in from Isac Lagerblad asking me what I think. If you go to Stockholm.se and you tab through the links you’ll find that the connected target gets highlighted on focus. I like it, what do you think?

Here are things that made me happy this morning. First of all how about some Bento Wall-E?

• Bento Art Blog and Bento Art flickr group
• Say it with a sound with http://sadtrombone.com/ and http://instantrimshot.com
• Reassuring helper ladies of the web needed a home: http://www.headsethotties.com/
• A T-Shirt History of Mozilla Flickr Set
• Microsoft release an open source blogging tool/cms called Oxite
• One of my old C64 demo scene buddies releasing a JavaScript Plasma effect (although DIVs would render faster I guess)

And I found a cookie left in the jar!

enjoy the day
Chris

Following the Geekmeet in Stockholm my ex-colleague from etoys (first .com boom) days – Tim Heighes – asked me to come to his new abode – BWIN – and talk about the current developer market situation and ideas what the future of JavaScript and web development might be. Furthermore the idea was to tell the business about the benefits of opening up data to the world.

I was scheduled to give three talks – an overview in the morning about where web development is heading and two technical talks to a smaller, expert audience in the afternoon. As Tim made the mistake of getting me drunk after the Geekmeet I didn’t have any time to prepare dedicated materials, but ad-libbed the overview showing live examples of sites and products I talked about, used GreaseMonkey to show how to prototype changes to web sites and generally reacted to questions and requests from the audience.

The afternoon talks were the performance talk from Geekmeet and my maintainable JavaScript material from the Fronteers conference (also available as a video in two parts part1, part2).

More important than the material was the communication with the teams in bwin and seeing what kind of challenges they have to face in their line of work. That their weapon of choice to battle browser inconsistencies is jQuery was another nice touch for me as it is cool to hear how other libraries than the YUI are used in a large, professional development environment.

I’ve had a great time and hopefully managed to inspire bwin to work more efficiently and open to the world more. It was also good to get to know some great geeks working in the office.

After the workshop Tim took me out for a drink in the city of Stockholm and I ended the evening in the ice bar of my hotel (a bar made from ice with a constant inner temperature of minus five degrees centigrade and very yummy Absolute mix cocktails).

The next morning Tim and Robert Nyman from Geekmeet took me on a tourist trip around the city of Stockholm. I have to say the city is a very nice place indeed and Swedes are wonderful people to visit and work with. I think there is a chance I will be back soon.