Firstly, apologies for not getting round to writing this earlier, I’ve been meaning to for ages but suddenly got busy… oops! Anyway, enough apologies, I’ll get on with it shall I!

I mentioned this on Twitter after I received an email from Charlotte about speaking at Geeky earlier this month. It was brilliant, it gave me all the information I needed to be prepared for the event. So here’s a quick run down of what she included and some other stuff I recently sent out to speakers at the event I’m organising with 12 Devs.

Tech

The main thing I think I always want to know is about the tech set up. I want to know what resolution I need to make my slides so they fit properly on the screen, there’s nothing worse than slides not fitting on a screen properly and having those horrid black lines at the top or sides. Next, I need to know what I’m going to be using to present on the night, whether I’m going to need to take my laptop with me or send the slides in early.

Software is also a factor, I’ve spoken twice recently at Ubelly events and both times they’ve asked me to create PowerPoint slides when I’m a Mac user. As long as I know this in advance I can work with it and try to provide them with good slides with fonts that will work on Windows.

The event

Tech is almost certainly the most important thing to know before the event, but it’s also good to know as much information about the event as possible. Even if I know the event already it’s good to have it written down for me to refer to just in case. Things like: - Where the event is, full address is nice. - When the event is, even if this should be obvious still nice to have a reminder - Timings for doors opening, talks starting and rough finishing time etc - The event format/running order for the night (I know this isn’t always possible but it’s good to know when I’ll be speaking)

Some other little bits that are quite good to know and things that I’ve sent out to speakers for the 12 Devs at Easter event coming up. These are just things like the rough attendance expected that night and whether or not the event will be recorded in some form or another. Although to be honest it was nice to not know in advance that the last Geeky was going to be live streamed that night, it meant I didn’t have chance to get nervous about it!

On the day/night

On the night (I always seem to be speaking at evening events at the moment), it’s good to know whether I can get there early and get a drink and have a bit of chance to relax before people show up. Another nice touch is getting a chance to test out my slides and get a feel for the stage/set up, I still get quite nervous so to know where I’m going to be standing and what I can see from where I am helps settle me a little!

Anything else?

Good communication on the run up to the event is always nice, just an email a week in advance and the night before was good enough to help remind me it was upcoming and that I actually needed to make sure I was ready etc. (maybe that says more about me than anything else).

And that’s about it to be honest. If there’s anything else anyone wants to add please tweet (I would say comment here but I don’t think I’ve set up comments on Octopress and well it’s taken me long enough to write this post so it’ll be even longer before there’s comments here!).

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to seeing you at 12 Devs at Easter and if you’ve not already got a ticket add your name to the waiting list and we’ll let you know as soon as any become available.