Speaking

Continuous Pitch Of Proposals

During the break I asked Mykola Gurov:
“Do you speak at Agile Testing Days?”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Exploratory Testing and GDPR.”
“That is hot.”

That thing called feedback

If I want to talk on a conference, then I have to submit a summary of my talk with other relevant information like email address and name.

An important thing for making a good proposal is feedback. For my first pitch of my workshop I got a clear mail. No clarification or feedback would be given on my failed attempt.

I was not really interested in a discussion, but only in some points to improve.

Mail me more.
(On the notes of “Tell me more” of Summer Nights)

One conference gave me a ray of hope for a related talk:
GDPR is important.
Bless you.

Another conference gave me specific feedback:
what are you exactly going to do during the workshop?
That is rather useful.

Feedback on diverse proposals

This year the Global Diversity Call for Papers Day held a workshop in Amsterdam. And there were many other places all over the world. This organisation really wanted to increase the number of diverse speakers.

During the workshop I gave my smartphone to one of the workshop leaders. She read my proposal and I started to talk.

Her response was: “I thought it was only about accessibility law.”

My initial plan was to talk about accessibility law and privacy law.
My workshop missed focus, so I dropped the accessibility law.

Another exercise was writing a profile. If a speaker has no interesting profile, delegates might skip his or her session. Or worse the proposal is not accepted at all.

The structure of the exercise was:

  • Tell about myself to 2 other people.
  • Write a profile including myself.
  • Listen to all profiles.
  • Collect the profiles for later use.

Feedback on structure

Within a month I spoke two men who had experience with teaching. I told about Stephen Covey who wrote several books about leadership.

He was able to convey his ideas to a lot of people at the same time. Above all he kept them involved.

Then I described the structure of my workshop and they loved it.

Feedback by rehearsals

Pitching is fine, catching is great.

When I needed people to practice my workshop, I said:
“It is about GDPR and testing.”