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SpeedGeek
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A SpeedGeek is a great way to get to know your fellow conference attendees, and more importantly, for them to get to know you. Have you done something cool? Does your project need more attention? Do you have a great new idea that you just need to bounce off people? The SpeedGeek is a fast, fun way to showcase your work in an informal venue, one-on-one with the audience.
You don't need much to prepare. All you need is a laptop and something to say for five minutes. Five minutes?! Don't worry, you'll just be saying it over and over again. To give you the maximum exposure and feedback, you will present to only a handful of audience members at a time in an intimate setting. Every five minutes, you'll meet a fresh new audience.
It's simple. It's fast. It's fun.
Who should participate?
Anyone that has something they want to show to the world should participate. Don't be coy. A SpeedGeek is a lot of fun for both the audience and presenters. And best of all, it's easy. All you need is a laptop and a five minute message.
How does it work?
- Each presenter is given their own station. All you need to bring is a laptop and a message. Note, at most conferences, Internet may not be available or reliable or fast or able to connect to your server. Please be prepared to present off-line.
- The audience is split into groups. The master of ceremonies will evenly divide audience members across each station.
- The SpeedGeek begins. Start your pitch! You better be fast. Five minutes goes by faster than you think.
- A bell rings. Sooner than you think, the master of ceremonies will ring a bell. Stop your pitch.
- The audience rotates stations. The packs of roving audience members have one minute to move to the next station. The next SpeedGeek begins right away!
It's that simple.
Variations
The ability to chorale TheAudience in this way requires a fair amount of control over them, and thus only works at events that are highly facilitated already. Consequently, you may have to vary your approach if you cannot create sufficient structure:
- Science Fair. At events where the audience has an expectation to move about freely, or the facilitator changes for each session, it is better to simply convert this event into a more science fair approach. Simply set up all the demoers at stations and let the audience move about freely for the time allotted. This also works best when either the number of demoers or the size of the audience is grossly out proportion to each other, or the time available.
- Elevator pitch. If you feel you, the facilitator, can command the audience's attention for a few minutes, but not for the whole session, you can compromise. First, set up the demo session like the science fair as mentioned above. Second, in the first few minutes of the session when you have the audience's attention, line up all the presenters at the front of the room (preferably in the same order they are arranged on the floor). Have each provide a 30 second (3 sentence) description of what they are demoing. In this way, the audience will quickly get a sense of what everyone is presenting. Then, simply open the session like the traditional science fair approach, where the audience is free to roam about to each station. Audience members will know what they want to see and what they don't want to see.
This more unstructured approach has the disadvantage that it fragments the community into sub-interests, which can limit cross-pollination effects (cf. HoneyBee). On the other hand, it allows the presenters to wander off and look at other demos that are of interest to them as well.
One defintion of a SpeedGeek might be an "elevator pitch". That is, a distillation of your unique knowledge and/or recent action down to a brief presentation that can fit neatly into in the average time two people might spend together in a typical elevator. -- WayneSmith
CategoryFacilitation?