Micropresentations should be used at every conference

There are still a lot of notes in my One Note file about Reboot 9.0 to work through. You might think of an abrupt crash having followed my rebooting in Copenhagen, to stretch the metaphor…

Anyhow, one of the things about the conference that I really liked was the cut-down Pecha Kucha format of micropresentations (a term used I think due to the copyright on Pecha Kucha) that peppered the packed programme at Reboot 9.0.

Basically people get to make their point, their pitch, their whatever, in the time that it takes for an automated slides presentation to move through 15 slides allowing a strict twenty seconds per slide. You see the clock counting down from 20 in the bottom right hand corner of the slide as soon as it appears…

It was an excellent way to do lots of things including: letting people pitch their upcoming conference session, recap on sessions they’d already facilitated, throw in their own pet ideas, share a brilliant idea. There’s a guarantee implicit in the format that no one will hog the mike, go in too long, bore people or lose their thread – I love it.

If I were organising a conference, especially one with parallel tracks of sessions and conversations such as Reboot, I would think about getting all the presenters on a given day to do micropresentations up front. This would help people decide which sessions are going to be best for them and also to grab key concepts and ideas from ones they won’t be able to attend, which would enrich the whole thought stew going on.  

Anyway, I’m seriously thinking about organising an evening session around these in Brighton soon. I know there’s a Pecha Kucha group already but there’s probably room for a media-y / geeky one too…

Anyway, here are a couple of pics of micropresentations from Reboot I enjoyed:

 

: : There’s a good 20 minute podcast from Nicole Simon interviewing Guy Dickinson about the micropresentation sessions in which he facilitated at Reboot.

: : : BTW does anyone know of a good plug-in or piece of software to do these (including the whole countdown thing) in Powerpoint? Reboot was utterly Mac dominated but I am chained to Windows.

Technorati tags: reboot 9.0, micropresentations, pecha kocha, , ,

7 responses to “Micropresentations should be used at every conference”

  1. Hi Antony,

    The micropresenters rocked, didn’t they? I popped the micropresentation format together in ppt and keynote templates, including the timer:

    http://www.participo.com/files/micropresentations/

    cheers,

    guy.

  2. They were superb – cheers, Guy. Thanks for the link too – really looking forward to trying this out!

  3. I’m up for trying me hand at a micropresentation in Brighton! Sounds good – lemme know if we can help in anyway.

  4. Cheers, Will – I’ll give you a shout.

    Well now we’ve got the software there’s no stopping us – we’ll sort something very soon…

  5. Antony – I think this is a great idea. I have been using automated Powerpoint presentations recently and found them a very successful way of getting across information in a short period of time.

    It makes you think more clearly in putting something together and has a valuable life away from the presenter. I only used Powerpoint because I don’t know how to use anything that is more multimedia.

    I’d love to come over to Brighton if you can get something scheduled.

  6. This sounds really interesting. I would love to see an example. Do you have any links?

    Personally, I usually work better presenting with a Whiteboard. A lot more dynamic but this could be going on along side whilst I’m scribbling.

    If you can coincide a meeting of Micropresentations around the time of your birthday (25th June!) I think I could be around.

    ~Robin

Leave a Reply