Chris Pels
New England Speaker Registry
Chris led this session on how to find more opportunities to public speaking in the New England area and to announce the soon-to-be released website, the New England Speaker Registry.
Thom Robbins and Philip DesAutels sat in to get feedback and share in the conversation. One point that came up was the rating system of Code Camp presentations of 100-400. Apparently this is based on a Microsoft scale according to the percentage of Powerpoint-to-Code. The general consensus was to move to an "Introduction, Intermediate, Advanced, etc..." approach. Good idea!
Philip mentioned an opportunity to speak to public schools throughout Massachusetts and that he was always looking for new speakers.
"Community Credits" was a term that is already taken, but as a Community Server fanboy I felt I had to mention it for its possibilities.
New England's Speaker's Registry is being created to register as an available speaker and a site to look for speakers. We talked about what type of information might be listed there, along with evaluations, speaker preferences, etc. The main objective of the session was what to do in Verson 1.0 of the site.
Don Demsak, Robert Holmes and Miguel Castro joined in the discussion, talking about their experience in speaking.
Robert mentioned the essential need for preparedness. Miguel noted that confidence and your comfort level with the subject are essential for success. DonXML talked a bit about mastering the act of presenting and writing code at the same time.
We started talking about scaling the site out to other regions, and as a historical point I wanted to confirm that the concept of Code Camp indeed started with our own Thom Robbins. Thom was still in the room who confirmed that he, Chris, and a couple of others formed the idea 3 years ago. New England was the first Code Camp, then Australia, then New Zealand, then New York then THE WORLD!
[tags: Chris Pels, Code Camp 5]