The Low-down on Speaking at GHC16

So you're speaking at GHC16. What do you need to know? How can you prepare to be the best you can be? How do you calm your nerves?!

Although I wasn't lucky enough to have any submissions accepted to this year's conference, I have spoken at Grace Hopper before along with many other venues. Let me start by reassuring you that this is one of the very best places to present. I have rarely found a more wonderfully supportive audience.

Let's get some of the official stuff out of the way. As a speaker, you need to thoroughly read through everything on the speakers section of the conference website. In particular, note the quick references on the right.

I'd like to draw your attention especially to the Speaker Ready Room info. There, you'll learn about uploading your slides before your presentation, and you'll see a link to the slides template. Please take the time to design your presentation using the template right from the get-go. Trying to shoehorn an existing presentation into the template tends to look unprofessional, and not using the template at all even more so. Also make sure to leave plenty of time to upload your presentation and test it. You'll want to make sure any embedded media is actually embedded, and that your fonts and colours look ok.

The conference website also includes some tips on speaking. I'd also like to share another amazing resource that brings you weekly inspiration and advice on speaking: a newsletter called Technically Speaking. Subscribe now and you will benefit leading up to your talk, and check out the archives as well.

Finally, I have a few tips of my own:

• Design your slides with as few words as possible. Convey the main idea through pictures and a short phrase.
• Add speaker notes into the notes section of the slides. When practising, you can simply read the notes at first. This should make you familiar enough to be able to improvise more day-of.
• Practice in front of colleagues at some point with enough time to receive feedback. Provide them with a written feedback form they can use to give you anonymous ideas for improvement.
• On the day of your talk, arrive in the room early to give yourself time to calm your nerves.
• Make sure you have access to water during the talk.
• Before you start, take some deep breaths, maybe with your eyes closed. Think yoga breathing.
• Invite the audience to chat with you after the talk, and stand somewhere where it's easy for the audience to actually do so.

Good luck with your talk – I'll know you'll be awesome!

The Long and Short of Answering the Grace Hopper Call for Participation

You have a great idea for a Grace Hopper conference session. A really really great idea! In fact, as you prepare to submit your proposal, you realize that your idea may be TOO great. How in the world will you and your panelists cover everything that needs to be said in the space of a one hour session? It's just not going to fit! What do you do now? First, know that you're not alone. Others are facing the same problem as they work on their proposals. Others faced the same problem last year, and the year before. So I asked Deanna Kosaraju, the Anita Borg Institute's VP of Programs, what advice she has for those whose GHC ideas won't fit neatly into a one hour session.

Deanna's top recommendation is that you really try to make the session fit into a single hour. Why? Because, based on prior GHC experience, Deanna expects there will be approximately ten times more conference submissions than there is physical space and time available at GHC 2010. In addition, the committees reviewing the program submissions will try to accept sessions from as many different presenters as possible. I'll offer some suggestions below for how to pare your session down. But here are your alternatives if feel you just can't make that work.

Can your idea be broken into two or more one-hour sessions? Divide them up with your collaborators and submit them (separately) as a mini-track. In the submission for each, describe how it is related to the other(s) and request that they be scheduled back-to-back (if that's necessary). But be forewarned: the committee may accept your multiple session proposals but only give you a single one-hour session to present them. This happened to me a few years ago when our two-panels-plus-one-BOF (Birds of a Feather) mini-track was accepted, but we were instructed to combine the two panels into one. We did, and used the BOF for the overflow conversation from the panel.

The other option is to include in your submission an explanation of how long the session should be. You will need to make a compelling case for why the session cannot be condensed into a single hour. You'll also need to show how the agenda will be broken up into chunks no longer than one hour, so that attendees will get regular breaks. Even if you do, the committee may accept your session proposal but only give you a single hour to present it. Deanna assured me this also has happened before.

Remember: The program committees will try to accept sessions from as many different presenters as possible. And they will receive many more great proposals than they can possibly fit into the available space and time. So let's go back to Deanna's original recommendation.

How do you condense a great session idea so it will fit into a single hour? Here are a few of my own suggestions, then I would love to hear yours:

• One reason that sessions get too big for one hour is by having too many speakers. Limit the number of panelists you invite, so that each will have adequate time to share her contributions.
• Select a subset of your topic to focus on. That might mean narrowing the problem space, e.g., focus on one special case or ignore special cases and focus on the general. It might mean selecting only the most important aspects of your topic, or perhaps the most popular (like a top ten list).
• Move some of your content into a reference area in the back of your slides. You won't have time to present it but you can let attendees know it's there. Post your slides on the conference wiki for attendees to download. Or create an online resource area where attendees can go to find and/or share more ideas (this can also be done on the conference wiki).
  

Now let's hear from you. Have you streamlined a large session idea to make it fit? Have you combined multiple sessions into one? What tactics have worked well for you?

A Cryptographic Solution for Patient Privacy in Electronic Health Records

As someone who has a close family member in and out of hospitals, patient privacy is a significant interest. Melissa Chase (link goes to her awesome CV) presented about her research at Microsoft about cryptographic solutions in this field.

Below is the 15 second summary.

The benefits of digitized patient records are:

1. Easier communication
2. Increased accuracy, growing from that easier communication
3. Lowers costs because of increased accuracy and easier communication

Now for the costs:

1. 100,000 digital records are easier to steal than 100,000 paper records
2. Large electronic systems are much more open to abuse by hackers, unscrupulous doctors, disgruntled employees (such as in this case, which is not what it seems)
3. Easier medical identity theft*

Major take-way:

Patients should have full access to their records, and control over privacy should not be all (every doctor gets every patient's records) or nothing (no digitization).

Valerie's post has a good summary of the technical magic involved! This presentation went from 0-100 pretty fast, but her consistent use of clip-art characters ("Dr Alice", "Charlie" etc) made it easier to keep up. Most of the presenters I have seen need to remember: Low, Slow and Loud. Lots of fast talking to finish in time.

*Medical identity theft is where thieves get medical care they cannot afford, or access to medication and equipment for the purpose of reselling it.

Inspirational Quote:

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.
--Jean Baudrillard

Designing Systems that Gain Public Trust: Simplicity, Transparency, and Security in e-Voting Systems

In this presentation, Kathy S Faggiani (Milwaukee School of Engineering) posed a massively important question to her audience: how confidant are you that your vote is counted?

If you are very confidant, check out blackboxvoting.org

According to the presenter, 3%-5% of optically scanned voting sheets are counted wrong. To this cynic, this number seems plausible--constitutionally terrifying, but plausible.

Voting is what separates a democracy from a dictatorship. Constitutionally mandated privacy and accuracy affect e-voting software development in fascinating ways.

Good to know: according to the presenter, the most important legal litmus test for vote-counting accuracy is whether the vote was counted as the voted intended. This is different from whatever the machine thought the voter wanted, which is what it actually does count.

This presentation had a narrative (see Valerie's post for more on that), the data was inviting, and the conclusions were incisive.

Best quote:

"Those who say it can't be done are often interrupted by people who are doing it"

Inspirational Quote:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!--Willa Cather

Preparing for my panel at Grace Hopper!

I'm moderating my first panel at a large conference at the upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing. I've been on panels before. I've done entire hour long presentations before. But I've never moderated a panel.

Now, in just a couple of weeks, I will be moderating "Open Source Community Development" where we'll be tackling issues about how Open Source communities grow, thrive, and possibly die or wither away. Interesting topics I hope we can explore will be about building trust and encouraging women to participate. All of these things I think will be helpful for the OpenSolaris community.

The question remains: how best to moderate? I know from personal experience that I appreciate a moderator who keeps the flow moving, knows when to take a discussion "off line", and keeps up a slide of all of the speakers' names so the audience doesn't have to remember. So, it's a given I'll do those things (and hopefully do them well).

But after reading several great "how to moderate a panel" blogs (thanks, Stormy, for the intitial link that got me started on this), I've gotten a lot of conflicting information, so I'm going to have to make some decisions myself. For example, several folks who have moderated other panels argue that the moderator must always introduce the panelists, while others suggest letting the panelists themselves do it. Personally, I've always introduced myself, either while presenting alone or on a panel.

Some recommend assigning a few questions to certain panelists in advance and making sure you all meet as a complete group before the panel, while others say that doing so will ruin the spontaneity of the panel. I believe that at least a short meeting before hand is warranted so we will at least have the name to face thing down.

All the advice is clear, though, I need to make sure I am personally familiar with all of the panelists' backgrounds and areas of expertise so I can direct questions appropriately. While I know a few of these women personally, or follow them on twitter, and clearly learned about them when we were proposing the panel, I still need to make sure I do all the appropriate research.

Do any of you have any advice in this area? After all, as the audience, you will be my customer!

Here are links to the advice I've been reading:

• Moderating Conference Panels, Dawn Foster
• How to Successfullyl Moderate a Conference Panel, Jeremiah Owyang
• How to Moderate a Panel, Derek Powazek
• How to Be a Great Moderator, Guy Kawasaki

Valerie Fenwick

pre-Keystone discussion on ICTD

So, what is ICTD? It's Information and Communications Technology for Development, or, applying computer technology in ways that are beneficial for society. As I look through this years Hopper's program, there is a lot more focus on technology for humanitarian purposes. Ever since Karen Banks of APC won the 1st Anita Borg Social Impact Award (Hopper 2004, Chicago), this has been an area of growing interest in the whole tech sector, not just for us women at Hoppers. Look at all the companies and tech foundations trying to "close" the digital divide -- this is reflected in the numbers of sessions at Hoppers related to ICTD, the rise in the numbers of women who are nominated annually for the GHC Anita Borg Change Agent awards, and the swell of interest in "doing well by doing good." Are women uniquely suited to match human needs to technological answers? We've been told we're the ones who really "care" about the end user, but is that just a stereotype or are we able to offer something different in this space? I want to invite you to chime in on these questions of community, gender, and technology - we are putting up a blog to pre-discuss our GHC panel "Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman" at http://gracehopper.ictdchick.com/ - us 4 panelists are ICTD researchers and practitioners who wish to connect with other attendees grappling with, and interested in being involved in, ICTD. Come chat!