What makes a good presentation?

I must admit I’ve not had all that much to do with the open source community. However, the advent of Open Source has had a distinct effect on the nature of development. In recent years Microsoft has changed its approach in response to this change. One of the most encouraging aspects of these changes has been the adoption of the principle of standards compliance.

At the last coders group meeting, Andrew Coates talked about the OpenXML standard that Microsoft has used for Office 2007. The standard is now ratified and publicly available for download. As someone who has had to struggle with document management systems incorporating Office documents in the past I am fully aware of how important this step is. Andrew is a great speaker and an enthusiastic advocate of this technology. Yes he is employed as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist, but his enthusiasm seems genuine and infectious. He also has a solid background in coding, so he can speak with authority.

It’s hard not to get caught up in his presentations and the audience threw questions at him left and right. Our group can be quite cynical when it comes to new technologies. There were a number of questions relating to the need to create another standard instead of using an existing one such as Open Office’s. I think he managed to answer most of the questions on the night.

I’ve had so much positive feedback since the meeting that I wanted to remark on it. More generally though I think the best speakers we get at the meetings are those that involve the audience taking questions and attempting to answer them as they go. Lively debate has often ensued although fortunately no fights have broken out at time of writing. It really isn’t possible to get any level of discussion going unless you have a speaker with a good understanding and passion for the subject. Knowledge and Passion: there are no doubt many other elements that combine to make a good speaker, but I suspect those two are the key factors.