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Guidelines for Presentations

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This page is supposed to help speakers create a MySQL University presentation. For questions or comments please contact Stefan Hinz.

Contents 1 Format 2 Style 2.1 General 2.2 Audience 2.3 Slides 2.4 Speaker notes 2.5 Background information 2.6 Presenting your presentation 3 Templates

[edit] Format

Presentations have to be in a format that everyone can easily access. Those formats include:

• Wiki format, "embedded" in the MySQL University session page (preferred)
• PDF
• JPEG (has the disadvantage that copy-and-paste isn't possible)

Other formats are not allowed. Let Stefan know if there are additional formats that you think should be allowed.

[edit] Style

[edit] General

Presentations should be in "presentation style", not in "documentation style" or anything like that. This means your presentation should have short blocks of information that only highlight or summarize important points, rather than elaborate or try to provide complete information about the subject you'll be talking about. The most common way of presenting those blocks of information are slides, although this is more a semantic concept than a presentational format: a "slide" may as well be a heading with a bullet-point list.

[edit] Audience

Consider your audience:

• Don't assume that attendees will read your presentation before the session. We ask them to do that but we cannot enforce this.
• Don't ask attendees to read your presentation while you remain silent, and then ask questions. MySQL University sessions are interactive lectures, rather than interactive book studies. :-)

[edit] Slides

It's up to you how to divide the blocks of information ("slides") you'll present. Some speakers prefer to have many slides, and some like only few slides better.

• If you use many slides, put less words on them.
• If you use few slides, you may put more words on them.
• Professional speakers rarely put more than 20 words on one slide.
  • That's a challenge, and for speakers who aren't used to giving presentations, it's probably even impossible.
  • But still, it's worth trying. Your attendees will be grateful.
• If you can, add pictures and diagrams to your slides.

[edit] Speaker notes

You should try to avoid using your slides as a text book to read from. Your slides should just have the summary, but you'll probably want to speak in full sentences, anyway. :-) The less experienced you are with giving presentations, the better it is to prepare notes to actually read from when giving your presentation.

[edit] Background information

If you need to provide background information (which generally is a Good Thing), try to avoid cluttering your slides. Rather than that, link to pages in the MySQL Internals documentation or in the MySQL Reference Manual, or any other resource that will prove helpful for that purpose. It's fine to provide links to background information in your slides.

[edit] Presenting your presentation

For each block of presentation ("slide") you present, proceed like this:

1. Speak out the title (or topic) of the slide.
   • This will help people who didn't attend your session but rather listen to the voice stream recording (and your presentation) at some later point.
   • It will also help attendees – consider that no one is physically present and thus easier distracted by other things.
2. Read from your speaker notes everything that is relevant for the current slide.
   • Stick to the current content/context. Try to avoid mentioning things you're going to cover a few slides later.
   • Don't let questions interrupt you until your done with your text for this slide.
3. When you're done with the slide, make a break of at least 15-20 seconds.
   • If you have the impression that your audience is sleeping :-) you may ask if there are questions when you start that 15-20 seconds break.
   • Take that time to look at questions or comments on the IRC channel.
   • If there are questions on IRC, answer them, or say that you'll answer them later.
   • Keep in mind that there's a lag of up to 10 seconds between speaking and attendees hearing you. Questions might drop in just before you had planned to continue with the next slide.

[edit] Templates

Please find templates you can use to create your presentation here.