How to make a smash hit presentation

Hack­ers seem to be a tough crowd to please. I’m still at the 23C3 in Berlin, Ger­many and attended Pornog­ra­phy and Tech­nol­ogy — a love affair. Here’s a lit­tle some­thing I picked up at the presentation.

This post (based on sim­ple obser­va­tion) will tell you how to make a smash hit pre­sen­ta­tion with lots of applause from hun­dreds of peo­ple pack­ing them­selves in a room not big enough to hold the entire audi­ence. Here’s how to please geeks.

1. Make sure the title of your pre­sen­ta­tion includes con­cepts dear to the atten­dees.
In this case ‘tech­nol­ogy’ and ‘pornography’.

2. Be a girl

Not to be sex­ist, but in this crowd, it doesn’t hurt being a girl. When you talk, peo­ple lis­ten. And you get to do teasy lit­tle jokes. Extra points for wear­ing a skull t-shirt.

3. Be wells-spoken
Well-spoken and well-prepared go well together. Throw in some witty com­ments here and there to demon­strate you’re on top of your stuff.

A com­bi­na­tion of 2. and 3. could go some­thing like:

If I like it, it’s erotic, if you like it, it’s pornog­ra­phy
(applause and laughter)

4. Present in the evening
Peo­ple are begin­ning to relax and have beers. They defi­nately won’t mind a slightly dif­fer­ent spin on things and sim­ply want to have a good time.

5. Make use of imagery
Every­one likes a good pic­ture. So throw’em in there. Espe­cially if your sub­ject allows for a bit of nudity in one way or another.

6. Find hybrid exam­ples
Demon­strate you’re into your mate­r­ial by includ­ing recent tech­nol­ogy from funky sources. When mem­bers of the audi­ence shout for a demo of the Wiibra­tor , you can safely ignore them, con­fi­dent that you from thereon con­nect even bet­ter with the rest of the peo­ple present.

Inter­est­ingly, the pre­sen­ta­tion included a ref­er­ence to ‘free ride’. Min­utes ear­lier, I had learned from Lawrence Lessig that the fear of freerid­ing is the rea­son for the NC-restriction in Cre­ative Commons-licenses. In this con­text, how­ever, it turned out that ‘free ride’ is the title of an old film fea­tur­ing two lady hitch-hikers piss­ing them­selves with joy observ­ing a man uri­nat­ing in a for­est. They then decide to do what every man/women-encounter dic­tates in the world of pornography.

That wiser, I’m just gonna end by stat­ing that I really enjoyed the pre­sen­ta­tion. Well thought out, well exe­cuted to a respon­sive audi­ence in that spe­cial CCC-congress evening atmosphere.

Update: Régine Debatty (whose pre­sen­ta­tion I had the plea­sure of watch­ing) has more elab­o­rate notes on the pre­sen­ta­tion and a good point: While one of the best pre­sen­ta­tions execution-wise, it might have been a lit­tle too blog post like for my taste. A few sur­pris­ing punch­lines / con­clu­sions link­ing it all with our rea­son for being at the hacker con­fer­ence would have made it a killer.