We’re looking for people like you to share their stories. Yes, you!
We’ll help you plan and make your talk or workshop. We welcome first time speakers, and people who are just getting started on their journey. If you’re not sure what you’d like to speak about we can help, or suggest some topics.
Each meetup is about an hour long. Your talk can be anywhere between 10 minutes and 50 minutes. We’ve found that 20 or 30 minutes is usually a good length.
Help!
We would love to help you and offer guidance on putting together a talk (or a workshop). We’ll be with you every step of the way that you’d like help with, on the iterative feedback process.
- Deciding on a theme. What are you interested in? What do you want to find out more about?
- Thinking of the elevator pitch. What makes an interesting story?
- Putting together an outline. Bullet points FTW! What’s the one main point you want to get across, and how do you start and end?
- Making slides. Making your own, or using a template.
- Practising the talk or discussing the workshop content. We’ll be an appreciative and supportive audience that will provide constructive feedback.
Tell me more
If you’d like to read a bunch of stuff, here are about 30 links about preparing for and making a talk. Here are three picks: a small, a medium, and a large size.
- 6 Tips for Speaking In Public by author Neil Gaiman.
- How to write a talk by Soledad Penadés. With a handy flow chart of the process.
- How to prepare and write a tech conference talk a long, detailed, post from Lena Reinhard on her process of preparing for a talk.
“But I’m a newbie!”
We welcome people from all experience and knowledge levels!
If you’re new to speaking, we are happy to help. If you already know about a topic are passionate about it, we’ll help you put together a talk or workshop on it. Speaking can be scary at first, but it’s very rewarding to share your knowledge.
If you’re new to the topic, we want to hear from you! You can help show other people like you that it’s not as scary and confusing as it looks: everyone has to start somewhere. If you’ve just learned something you are the best person to tell others about it: you know the things to look out for, and what’s unexpected. And if you haven’t started learning it yet, giving a talk about a topic is a great excuse to dig into learning about it.