Baton Rouge .NET User Group Speaker Idol
Summary
The idea of our Speaker Idol event was established in early 2009, shortly after forming an Events Committee for the Baton Rouge .NET User Group. This committee consists of two members and is responsible for coming up with event ideas that would add variation to our current meeting format and for planning additional events that would add value to our development community. Speaker Idol was the first event established by this committee with the primary contributor being Lance Dunnehoo.
The primary objective of the event is to provide an entry point for beginning speakers interested in getting their feet wet without having to talk for an hour and to give us a break from our usual meeting format allowing for multiple members to present and for a multiple topic meeting.
Details
We have established some rules and guidelines in order for this event to be successful:
Five members present for up to fifteen minutes on a technology topic of their choice. The speaker is given a warning with a few minutes remaining and is stopped after the time limit is exceeded. It is important to enforce the time limit as this meeting will at least be an hour and a half. After the presentation, the speaker is asked questions by a three judge panel. For fun, each judge imitates a judge from original American Idol. Judges are a combination of the user group leads and members chosen by the event coordinators. Each judge is limited to one or two questions and they are the only ones allowed to ask them due to time constraints. The questioning generally lasts around five minutes and is intended to be somewhat comical to relieve the stress of the speakers. This period allows for a cleaner transition between presentations as during this time the next speaker is setting up for his presentation. After the final presentation, paper ballots are passed out to each attendee listing each speaker and their topic. The attendees are allowed to vote for only one speaker. The ballots are collected and the organizers count the ballots with the top two winning prizes. While the ballots are being collected and counted, we are doing our raffle and giving away the SWAG. The first place winner receives one hundred dollars worth of gift cards and the second place winner receives fifty dollars worth of gift cards. The gift cards can be for electronics stores, book stores, or restaurants and are contributed by local sponsors.
We have had a variety of topics including Regular Expressions, Open XML, Cucumber, Principles for OO Success, and .NET security vulnerabilities. Presenters have included first timers, up-and-comers, and those trying to polish up their presentation skills. At our first event in July we had one speaker expand on his presentation and later present at our SQL Saturday event. We anticipate that from our December event, many of these speakers will volunteer for another presentation in 2010. Due in part to the success of Speaker Idol and the need for growing our speaker pool, we have decided to integrate a fifteen minute presentation prior to the main presentation during our regular meetings.
Final Thoughts
This event can be somewhat of a challenge. Obtaining local speakers and assisting them to select a topic is a tall order, which we generally leave up to the coordinators of the event. For our event in December we were short presenters until just before the event. The group leadership is busy seeking additional funds for the prizes. The December event was very challenging being the end of the calendar year. Fortunately, we were able to get some assistance from one of our sponsors, GoodPeople, in obtaining sponsorship from two restaurants, Kona Grill and The Grape. The biggest advice that I can give for any leader interested in trying this for one of their meetings is to plan ahead and obtain the speakers and sponsors as early as possible. It will make your life much easier and allow for more time to promote attendance. We have a great deal of experience with this type of event now and have come up with some collateral (flyers, etc). If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact me directly: mikehuguet@gmail.com
Florida Microsoft Community Speaker Idol Competition
A similar series of events has been taking place among user groups in Florida. These events will culminate in a regional Speaker Idol competition during February and a state championship round in March. For more details, please refer to this blog entry: http://www.lakelandug.net/SpeakerIdol/tabid/81/Default.aspx
If you have an interesting community event report to share, contact us at noram.marketing@ineta.org.
-- from the INETA NorAm January 2010 Newsletter