Get over there, read the short introduction, and make with the answering! It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so, and your participation is essential.
Also, please spread the link far and wide—it works best if as many people as possible take it, not just ALA readers. Posting word in any relevant groups, forums, lists, etc. would be awesome. Put the word on the street! Please. Thanks!
This wiki is intended to be a place where those who are interested in becoming speakers (particularly, but not exclusively, in the web world) can come to get advice, mentoring and help. It is also intended to be a meeting place for those who are interested in helping others become speakers.
On the same site: an evolving (and evolvable) page containing Advice.
…some practical suggestions for folks who want to gain some confidence in their own speaking abilities and how I worked up to presenting at conferences… I’ve spoken at a bunch of conferences over the past year, and well, this might help someone.
Below are a list of some of the events which encourage people to get up and speak about what they love. The list is Australian-centric, mainly because that is the circles I hang with, but I would love to hear of similar things going on around the world…
There’s really nothing in the post I don’t want to quote, but this bit in particular jumped out at me:
…as a conference organizer, you tend to be conservative. You need to ensure a speaker list that will fill seats. This isn’t “we want to maximize profit” filling of seats either, this is “holy crap we just signed a contract that would put us out multiple tens of thousands of dollars if we don’t hit certain numbers”. When you book larger venues, you make commitments and really put yourself on the line financially. Those who haven’t run conferences simply can’t understand what a nerve-wracking experience this is.
On that post, a comment by Derek PowazekThis is an ongoing debate (as it has to be) though the argumentation tends toward the self-righteous, self-evident mode: look at all these white boys on the roster. What are they thinking? I think we can do better. I think we have to do better.
One of the reasons I got very excited about the internet when I discovered it in the 90s was because, finally, here was a place where race, gender, and religion truly did not matter. Where you could succeed or fail on the strength of your ideas alone – not what color you were or what junk was in your pants.
I still believe this to be true.
I don’t see how being male, female, white, black, brown, purple, queer, asexual, cancerous, capricorn or a carrot would matter if you happen to also be a professional in the web-standards-meets-development world. I would, honestly, attend a speech given by a carrot if that carrot was recognized as a leader in the field. That’s what professional speeches are all about.
To me, this is the key to being race- and gender-neutral — actually not caring about a person’s race or gender, but simply whether they can contribute what is needed in a given situation.
I firmly believe that conferences shouldn’t simply be mirrors for the Web business, reflecting whatever is current and accepted. A good conference can act as a force on the industry. Conference organisers have a great opportunity here and I think it’s a shame to see it wasted.
I am going to go out on a limb here and use smart mob mentality here. If you know of a web professional who is talented, has done some remarkable things, and should be speaking at some web design conferences by all means let us know…
You never know, we might just change the world.
I had most of a followup to yesterday’s post written, all reasonable and spiked with some humor and maybe a little dry, which I suppose is what most people have come to expect from me in general, and then it fell apart in concert with my inner stability.
I’ve definitely incurred a lesson in “post in haste, repent in leisure”. The internal aftereffects of the post have been extensive and unexpected. I don’t have them all sorted out yet; it may take months. I don’t even have names for all the things that have roiled up. I may be undergoing a drastic phase change in my thinking, or I may just be grieving something I didn’t know I mourned, or perhaps I’m raging against a world I sometimes feel powerless to alter. I don’t know. I do know that if I’d known this would be the effect of posting, I’d never have done it—which is one of the best arguments in the world for having done it.
I’ll not mince words: I screwed up pretty badly yesterday. The real question is how. I’m not sure I’ll know the answer for a long time. Was my mistake in speaking honestly? Was it in how I wrote it all down? Was it in the rhetorical approach I took? Was (is) the flaw intrinsic to me? Am I the very problem I so much want to eliminate?
If I have erred and caused harm by that error I apologize. I am as ever human, mistakes and all, flaws aplenty, and while that’s an explanation, it’s not an excuse. It is never, ever an excuse.
I am deeply sorry today, but not for what I was trying to say. I might be sorry for how I said it, or for a number of other things. I know I’m sorry for causing hurt in others. That was the last thing I wanted. I was trying to make a positive statement, trying to detail what I find to be an empowering concept. A lot of people were supportive, but a number of people, many of whom I respect and some that I care for and a few that I love, were disappointed by what I had to say. I disappointed them, some very badly, which means I’ve let them down. And I really, really hate letting people down.
And here’s the worst part, the absolutely darkest most awful painful part of the entire situation: I let them down by being myself.
That tears. It rips ragged claws of paradox across my throat, up my jawline, through my brow.
In my head, I know that the recipe for failure is trying to please everyone, but my heart doesn’t buy it. I’m human, and no matter how impossible the task I want to be what everyone wants me to be. Which I can’t be. I can only be myself. I can only hope to improve myself. And I can only do that according to what I truly believe, down at my core, because one person’s improvement is another person’s step backward, and changing oneself to meet the expectations of others is a fool’s game at best.
I am who I am, and it will not be to everyone’s liking. I will never see the world in the ways that everyone wishes me to see it. This is an essential truth, something that should be obvious to anyone, the sort of thing one should never think of trying to contradict.
And yet.
I know that there were a number of people who understood what I was saying and agreed with me, who in some cases were proud of me, and that they are no less important than those who didn’t understand or who did understand and were disappointed. I should concentrate on that balance, see the whole mixture, but I’m just not wired that way. For whatever reason, my genetics or my upbringing or whatever it is, I can’t help but focus on the negatives. In this case, on those I let down.
There’s no reason for sympathy here. I knew the third rail was fully electrified, and I chose to tap dance upon it. The outcomes of that choice will serve to teach me, if I listen—but what I will learn is still very much an unknown. I only hope that, in the end, it confers a net positive effect on me and the world around me.
Among all the other stuff this past week, I let something slip off the radar: an interview with me over at the Lunartics blog. The interview was conducted via e-mail by Amy Armitage, who I briefly met last year at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas. It’s not your usual “why is CSS important” kind of interview; Amy likes to keep things fun while still covering serious questions. It’s definitely worth a read.
It also scoops news of a development I’ve never gotten around to mentioning: in October 2006, I was inducted as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. It’s a pretty incredible honor, given that it’s an invitation-only body of 500 members including “David Bowie, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Internet inventor and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf, ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria”. The fact that my name appears on the same list as those people is jaw-dropping enough. To me, it wasn’t the most stunning part by a long mile.
I’ll admit, though I’d heard of The Webbys, I assumed the IADAS was one of those name-collector groups, like those “Who’s Who in America” books where you pay to be listed. Instead, I found that the IADAS levies no membership fees, and I was deeply surprised and pleased to discover that they invite people based on their actual qualifications. How do I know? Because my welcoming letter didn’t praise my web design work. Instead, it cited my “dedication to promoting Web standards”, my “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS”, and proclaims that I’ve “helped inform excellence and efficiency on the Web”.
Yes, the text string “HTML and CSS” was actually in the letter.
It’s a little difficult to express how important this recognition is to me. See, most of the time, I’m introduced and perceived as an influential web designer, which is frankly insulting to actual web designers everywhere. If you aren’t reading this post via RSS, look around. Does this look like influential web design? Hell no. At best, we can call meyerweb’s design minimalist and maybe—maybe—possessed of a certain elegance. And it only took me five years and ripping off ideas from Khoi Vinh to get here!
But I’ve never claimed to be a designer. I think the perception that I am one arises because I get linked to from people who really are designers. I’ve always claimed to be a communicator. I’m someone who’s done his best to explain, promote, and advance the technologies that let designers do their work. I’ve invested tons of time and effort into making good web design easier without sacrificing clean and semantic markup. I wouldn’t say that work is done by any stretch, but there’s been a lot of progress. Sometimes I forget just how much.
And so, to be invited to join the IADAS not for what I’m usually thought to be, but actually for who I am—it’s an indescribable feeling. A fantastically good one, certainly! But not one I could describe no matter how many words I threw at the problem.
It’s a delicious irony, and I do so love my irony: my powers of communication fail me when I wish to express my feelings over being honored for my communicating, over all those years, my love of the web and my passion for getting it right and the inner workings of how to make that happen.
But I can at least say this:
Thank you. Thank you for coming to read my posts, for reading my books and articles, for listening to me speak. Thank you for being the other end of the conversation. Thank you for being open to what I have to say, and for responding with your insights and perspectives, all of which have changed me in untold ways. Thank you for making everything I’ve done and said and written about the web worth far more than what I put into it.
Thank you for making this honor possible.
In case you’re one of the people who’s been following the Twitter stuff, and you’re on OS X, then kindly allow me to direct your attention to Twitterific 1.1. Despite its paltry 0.1 increase in version number, it’s acquired some great new features.
The most wonderful addition, in my opinion, is a preference setting that lets you make the window act modal, or not, as you prefer. Having set my copy to “act as normal window”, at least half my problems with Twitterific were abolished. They’ve also changed the auto-hide behavior so that it will auto-hide a short interval after popping up, whereas before it would only auto-hide after a manual refresh (at least, that’s how my copy behaved). This makes it a lot easier to ignore in the background, since it won’t behanging around until you bring it to the foreground. Perhaps this is a side effect of it acting like a normal window. Regardless, it’s welcome. In addition, I like the ability to define a hotkey to bring up the Twitterrific window and the “launch when I login” option.
They’ve also added a post character counter, so you know how close you are to hitting the tweet cap. That’s nice to see, though as I understand it, the number of characters permitted for a post is dependent on the number of characters in your username. Twitterific just gives you a flat 141 characters—which, given the basic nature of Twitter, seems like it really ought to be more than enough.
Now, if it just let me define my own background-foreground colors and made it easier to replace the alert sound, I’d regard it as being pretty much perfect. (Yes, I can dig into the package contents and replace the alert sound, but I’d rather there was a preference setting so that I don’t have to futz around inside the package every time I update the software.)
Oh, and if you’re a Twitterific user, you absolutely want to add Twitterific as a friend, since they use that channel to tweet release announcements and tips on using Twitterific. If I’d had them added to my Twitter account, I wouldn’t have had to post about my frustration over trying to change usernames—they’d tweeted the answer the day before I posted here—and could have thus been spared the shame of broadcasting to the world my ignorance of the proper spelling of “terrific”. Though I suppose in that case, I’d still be ignorant, so maybe it’s better I posted after all.
Well, either way, if you’re using Twitterific 1.0 or an OS X user interested in using Twitter, check out the new version.