Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘makemeaspeaker’

Make me a speaker – revived!

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

Summary: Mozilla is releasing a Evangelism Representative program and I’ll be coaching Mozillians to become public speakers.

microphone

Five years ago a few well-meaning web folk in the UK were ready to start a program called “make me a speaker”. I blogged about it and there was a Wiki at http://www.makemeaspeaker.com/ which is now defunct (Wayback machine archive here). One of the things I also published back then was a Public speaking survival kit.

As with many great ideas, makemeaspeaker.com one died quickly as people got busy with other things and of course others thought it makes more sense to offer speaking and presentation training as a service for money.

Two years later I took the idea up again and making myself a developer evangelist I published the Developer Evangelism Handbook.

Other things that happened were the Speaking out events (here, here and here) organised by Laura North.

Now I am happy to announce that a larger part of my job with the awesome that is Mozilla will be taken up doing an Evangelism Reps program. Here is what it is about:

Today the Developer Engagement Team has launched the Evangelism Reps program – a special interest group within ReMo. Each year, we get thousands of requests to send Mozilla speakers around the world to talk about HTML5, new web technologies, Mozilla’s mission, our projects, products and more. Now, we would love for you to join the effort and become a Mozilla speaker too!

This program is open to paid staff and Mozilla Reps of all skill levels and capabilities. If you are a new speaker and have always wanted to represent Mozilla at events, you can take advantage of our advanced speaker training where you can learn from people like Christian Heilmann and Robert Nyman on how to give effective presentations and get access to their best practices. People who are veteran speakers can also benefit by having the tools and resources available to host events, prepare stunning screen casts and be mentors to new Evangelism Reps.

[...]

The Evangelism Reps program information is on the wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SIGs/Evangelism_Reps

We anticipate our first training to be held in May so stay tuned for this exciting opportunity.

This means I will be running interviews, give reviews, run a speaker training and publish the Evangelism Reps toolkit – the latter of course being available for everybody (not only Mozilla Reps and employees) on our Wiki.

I am terribly excited about this as it means I can “crowd source” myself much more. It means of course that I will speak less at conferences myself, but that had to be done anyways. I will also sync some of this effort with Speaking Out and the Women of Mozilla programs.

Good times ahead.

Photo by Ben Dalton

Being a public speaker in the web business

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

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:

Explaining Developer Evangelism

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Ever since I got the fancy title of “Developer Evangelist”, people look at me cross-eyed and wonder what that is. The reactions reach from “oh so you don’t code any more” to “that’s marketing isn’t it?”. Both are wrong.

I see the job of an evangelist to validate your company and its products in the outside world. This means that you need to keep an eye on what your company is doing, give feedback and stop bad documentation and too complex systems from going live. In order to achieve this you get to know systems before they go out, play with them and write or help write their documentation. You also go out into the world, speak at conferences and go into companies for “brown bags” and find out how people use your employer’s products. The feedback you get from that helps you validate or defeat internal assumptions about “what every developer needs” and “how people use things”.

I am in Bangalore, India at the moment and was asked to train evangelists for the local market. A bit of a weird concept as you find evangelists internally – you do not train them to become one.

In a two hour session I was asked to outline what it means to be an evangelist and what to do and not to do. Here’s the outcome on slideshare:

[slideshare id=674444&doc=developerevangelism-1224563721992430-9&w=425]