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The Teleprompter Presentation Anti Pattern
A few days ago an email hit my inbox. It was a request for speakers in an event. That in itself is no cause for alarm, I am getting quite a few of those.
What was strange about this email was the... stipulations that it had. Basically, it listed the available topics, stated that all materials for the sessions were prepared (presentation, prep videos, etc), so all the speaker had to do was to show up, because no real experience was required.
I cringed when I saw that. I consider such a thing to be a practice is deceiving the attendees. Someone showing up for a session expect to get an discussion on the topic from someone who actually knows what they are doing. If the conference wanted someone to just recite the pre-created content, it should have hired an actor.
From the speaker perspective, I consider this even more of a problem. To quote a friend of mine, talking about something entirely different. You want me to put my name, my good reputation behind your stuff? What for? That is a very short path to tainting one's reputation.
I have been to such presentations, and I consider them horrible from all aspects. When I show up for a presentation, I expect to actually have some value added over the docs or marketing materials. If I wanted to read the docs, I could hit the site easily enough on my own. And I usually don't want anything to do with marketing materials.
Comments
Interesting are you aloud to have an opinion if the material is crap? or are you expected to be a robot and just present?
As you say in this case an actor is what you need :P
I've been to a few Microsoft local events where they did this. It is usually a huge waste of time for most of the attendees. The reader of the script usually doesn't know the technology, so asking questions is useless ("I'll have to get back to you on that" ... and they never do).
I find that a large part of the appeal to attend an event is to ask the speakers questions afterward. Much of the best content comes from question and answer sections and the discussion. I agree, it would be very deceiving for those looking at a schedule in which the speaker follows a script and can't or won't be answering questions.
I wonder if the prepared presentation has a "Questions?" slide.
I also seen it at local MS events, but with the opposite effect: Most speakers acknowledged the slides were given to them, and then frequently diverged from them to give their own material. Some even claimed to have revised the slides with their material before the lecture.
I believe MS like doing it this way, so they can make sure that legal/marketing has their say on the content. (Raymond Chen tells a story where marketing revised his slides so that every reference to "VB" was changed to "Microsoft Visual Basic.NET (tm)", Unfortunately, in that presentation, "VB" stood for "vector buffer")
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