A Hypocrite’s Guide to Public Speaking

Speaking at Barcamp in Omaha has turned into something of a tradition for me. Even though we’ve been busy with a new baby and getting our house ready to sell, I made the foolhardy decision to keep the tradition alive this year.

I love Barcamp because there is a palpable, scrappy energy to the unconference format, and you can experiment with things you wouldn’t do at a more traditional conference. In that vein, I decided to take a risk—instead of giving a normal talk with normal slides and normal speaking, I thought that it would be fun to experiment in something that was almost performance art.

I crafted a presentation about public speaking in which I didn't say a single word aloud. In fact, I purposefully did the opposite of many of the best practices I knew about public speaking, including but not limited to the 10 tips outlined in the talk. Thus, the title "A Hypocrite’s Guide to Public Speaking."

The web-based presentation tool I used was created explicitly for this talk (you may recognize BigText) and it allowed me to do a few special things (break the rules) in a way that would have been much more difficult with traditional presentation software like Apple’s Keynote. I don't think I'll give away any more than that, have a look at the video below.

There is an additional separate video that contains the Q&A from the talk. Sorry—some of the questions may be inaudible.