In Defense of the Slide Deck

The minimalist deck from last week

At CodeMash, I had the opportunity to see Scott Chacon, from GitHub, speak about motivating developers. Scott gave an excellent talk, and his slides were loved by many for being clean an minimal. Scott is an outstanding speaker, and his talk was full of a lot of great information. I was excited and inspired, and I want to share his talk with other developers—mission accomplished from a speaker’s point of view. But it’s unlikely I’ll be able to share much information, because most of the good stuff was spoken. Without the talk, the slides have a few words of inspiration and a link back to themselves.

Why am I writing like crazy?

These talks aren’t freshman biology, or an MCAT review course (both of which I’ve taught). We’re not trying to open a firehose of facts, meant for the write/review/recite cycle. Many of the talks at technical conferences are meant to open eyes as to possibilities, to provoke thoughts into new development paradigms, or inspire us to achieve (I’ll argue the same should be said for freshman biology, but that’s a different blog post). The initial listening is where the inspiration recognition of how the topic fits into the greater whole occurs, so the ability to sit back and think with a clear mind, unencumbered by a feeling of need to capture the information, means we funneling the information into a deeper part of our brains. Not necessarily the fact-recall part, but the more primitive part, where information becomes ingrained in our psyche.

Tragically, the process of trying to capture information inevitably means we miss key information. And this is why a second, reviewable source is so important. That was the purpose of our notes in school, and why so many lectures are being recorded in whole in colleges. Sharing information is fundamental to the animal kingdom. Bees have their wiggle dance, and after seeing it once, thousands of bees can reproduce it. Birds have their songs, after hearing it once, the flock can repeat it. We humans have speech and writing, but we’re not as adept as the birds and the bees when it comes to absorbing a message through a single exposure.

I really appreciate it when speakers up front let me know that the slides, samples, and possibly text are available online. That knowledge completely changes my interaction with the presentation.

Maybe that’s what makes keynotes special?

For this argument, the specialness of keynotes is being information you can’t get anywhere, that is provided as a privilege of your attendance. Maybe so, I can see that point, but I disagree. With any good information, go forth and spread the word. That’s the point of information.

The half-deck-for-tomorrow

I get it that a speaker shouldn’t be reading the slides wholesale. And sticking hard to a pre-defined script means that a talk can’t ebb and flow with the audience’s questions or interests. But the basic guts of the talk need to be available after the talk is over. One of the solutions I sometimes use is creating a very informative talk, then hiding a lot of the deck. I keep the topic level slides visible, use them as guides as to what we’re discussing. The hidden slides have the greater detail I want to cover, so when people go back to work, they can more easily share what they saw.

How I’m going to improve

I’m going to make my visible slides more attractive. I’ve never been able to go completely Presentation Zen, but now that I’m speaking more, I’m going to work on becoming more zen. Besides Scott’s talk, another great set of slides I saw recently were Dave Isbitski’s Windows Phone 7 Firestarter slides. They were well done—attractive and minimal, and supported by other decks and lab materials. There will be hidden slides with greater detail for future reference.

I’m not slamming Scott!

This post is by no means meant to be a slam on Scott, so please no one take it that way. It’s more of a plea. I really hope someone got a video recording of the talk, or that there is a transcription somewhere. Because what he said, much like the projects in GitHub itself, deserves to be shared. Shared far and wide.