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Obtaining Guest Speakers For Users Groups?
sdweber asks: "I am the president of the LUG here at Lehigh University. Many members of the group have expressed an interest in having a guest speaker or speakers come in and talk about Linux, Open Source, or other geek-friendly topics. Looking for a good speaker, however, is proving harder than I thought. There are a few big names that come to mind quickly (ESR, RMS, and others) but beyond that I'm not sure where to look. Has anyone had a good/bad experience with guest speakers? Who are some good people to chase down? Of course, being college students, we don't have a whole lot of money to offer the speaker, but there are plenty of interested listeners eager to learn. Any suggestions?"
A good place that I tried to look for speakers when I was a college LUG president was career fairs. Hunt down Sun, SGI, IBM, etc... and see if they're willing to come talk to your group. They usually are and usually free as well. Remember to mention that you have seniors that are looking for jobs.
anyone that refers to themselves with 3 letter abbreviations (RMS for example) are usually good about talking about geeky topics...
.sigs??
-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I can't believe someone beat me to posting this. I was all set to brag on our behalf :)
Finkployd
When I checked ESR asks only that you pay for his trip, not his speaking time. This may work out better than many other speakers. Alternatively, you could consult with another local professional society (ala ACM) who get money to pay for guest speakers, etc.
I'm up here in Minot, ND let me know if interested! :-)
I'll post the outline if anyone's interested.
--------
get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
A couple of days ago Donald Becker spoke here in
Linkoping, Sweden. He spoke about Beowulf clusters
and Linux networking. The talk was both extremly
interesting and funny, and there was a great
questions and answers session after the talk.
A lot of credits to Donald for giving a wonderful
talk which was appreciated by a lot of people.
Also a lot of credits to http://www.lysator.liu.se
and http://www.nsc.liu.se for organizing the talk.
See http://www.scyld.com for more information
about Beowulf clusters and Linux network drivers.
Fredrik Henbjork
http://o112.ryd.student.liu.se
Scott, I go to Muhelnberg College (right down the road) and we too are struggling to get speakers. My thought is that a few schools (like us LVAIC schools) should combine forces such that we have more power to make speakers want to come. Muhlenberg has around 20 CS majors total, so we are not very attractive to come speak at, but Muhlenberg, Lafeyette, Lehigh, Moravian, etc all got together, you would be surprised how much better response would be.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
For small organizations (i.e., under 25 full-time staff people), you can probably contact the proposed speaker directly. You might have to go through a secretary: Be courteous and follow their rules. The speakers will probably make arrangements themselves.
Organizations of 25-75 people often have a dedicated Public Relations Manager to handle such things: Ask for them. They in turn might send you to a freelancer or small agency, who'll make the arrangements.
With companies of this size and bigger, they probably won't be interested unless:
- You can deliver audience members who are in their target markets
- You can deliver large, high-profile audiences ("opinion leaders"), and/or
- The talk is convenient for them.
In short, you'll have a hard time getting someone to get on a plane to appear before your 20-member User's Group.Finally, for bigger organizations (75+ full-time staff), you may have to deal with the organization's P.R. firm. Go to their Web site, look under the "About us" button, then to the "Press" section. If they don't list a press contact, look for contact names and numbers on press releases.
Don't be discouraged if they turn you down, and feel free to pester them if they don't return your emails and phone calls within a week. Good luck!
--Tom Geller
President, Bandwidth P.R.
Tom Geller
I am sorry, but why do you need a guest speaker? To inspire you? When was the last time you got inspired by a speaker? What was the result of such inspiration? As surprising as it may, I don't believe your group needs a guest speaker. I believe that whatever you are seeking can come from inside, I challenge you to take control, to do something for the group that they will not have expected, or to do something that the group has never done. You really don't need Linus or ESR or RMS to come down and talk to you. What you need is the "next linus" to spring up to life, Linus was not a next anyone, he took action that he felt necessary, you ought to do that. Good luck. Cheers
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I know that my company hires people to do linux, as we are onsite support for RedHat. Hence, we give tech talks concerning all sorts of different stuff. Recently, Curtis Preston gave a talk in Boston concerning Backup Recovery practices. I know with all the linux people within the company, we could dig someone out to talk about the place of open source systems in the corporate environment.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Gorbachow is also VERY expensive I hear. He'll probably have an accent and won't be able to say alot about computers, because he's from Russia and they don't have computers there.
A lot of the other people mentioned aren't busy and would be pretty cheap. I can't imagine RMS or ESR or whoever charges AT ALL because speach wants to be free just like software.
Seriously though: If I were you, I'd maybe consider asking the members of your LUG what they would be interested in hearing about. Maybe you can start off by then members themselves speaking about their fields of interest/expertise.
To get speakers, you need members. Speakers don't generally want to come to talk to the 5 guys who live in your dorm and run Linux.
And how do you get members? Basic common courtesy. Pardon me while I go on a rant for a moment: I've only lived in my area for a year so I don't know a lot of people. Last night, I went to a LUG meeting that was a complete disaster (from my point of view). I show up and sit down at the table (dinner first, then speaker). No one asks me my name, no one tells me their name, no one has name tags, no one explains what's going on (even as simple as "once everyone gets here we'll do introductions, etc"). We sit around and try to hear one another over the noise for 30 minutes and then order dinner. Again, no explanation of how we are going to be paying, etc. We eat. At 7:00 we go upstairs and participate in much unexplained activity (handing out tickets for what turned out to be a raffle later, making in-jokes, etc). Speak for a while and then out.
If all I wanted a LUG for was technical information, I'd browse a website on the same topic and save myself the drive and price of dinner. I want a LUG to be a social group--talk about Linux issues, make local connections, etc. I know I wasn't the only new person there because I saw one or two one-off intros going on--but no concerted effort to make people welcome. I felt like I was attending a stranger's wedding.
I'm not a total socio-phobe myself--I was looking alert and interested in conversations, making eye-contact and even contributing comments. But only two people bothered to even ask my name and I'm pretty sure one of them was a new guy. Sure, I could ask names first--but shouldn't it be the function of the LUG to make visitors welcome and not the other way around?
(As a sidenote, why is there always one of those smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is wrong in any group of computerphiles? Somebody smack those idiots.)
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
4 weeks ago Alan Cox spend a weekend i Denmark and Sweden giving talks in Stockholm and Lund to the local LUG
he speeks very well!
Although the URL now redirects to linuxjournal, www.linuxresources.com used to maintain a list of people who could/would speak on Linux subjects. I notice in the table of contents that it's still there under the new ownership.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
Believe it or not, given the recent Linux/GNU explosion over the last few years, RMS and his new found fame still find time to visit some lower key places.
I go the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and it is the Computer Science nerve centre (yes, that's "re" up here in Igloo-land) of Canada, and one of the major schools in North America. But RMS didn't come here, he went to the small affiliated College across the creek to speak, literally.
There couldn't have been more than 150 people in the medium-sized room that he spoke in, and I don't imagine the College had a lot of offer him.
That being said, I'm not sure how the school got in touch with him, but it shows that you don't need to pack several thousand people in a metropolitan convention center to get some big names to speak to you.
A lot of these guys will jump at the opportunity to make their message heard in person. It might have something to do with altruistic motives, as opposed to corporate ones.
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
Back in the early '90s my local Atari (8 bit) users group got a guest speaker.
We had to decide who we wanted to speak, raise money to pay his hotel and transportation, and we even went and rented a more expensive hotel banquet room. Some memembers took the guy out for meals.
It went off rather well, I remember walking into the hotel, and seeing on their comptuer monitor "Space: talk by jon doe" (I can't remember the guy's name, but Space is/was the St. Paul Atari Users Group) The guy spoke for half an hour (very few people should be allowed to speak for longer!) with questions following.
One other point, keep your speaker busy, but not too busy. For instance if I was to bring Alan Cox in to my hometown I'd have to consider the 8 hour time difference. Somehow we would have to give him time adjust. Then various activities. Some time should be spent with users (In Alan's case your probably ahve a kernel hacker with an interesting problem!). Also plan time for other things. Someone should take him to the local zoo, or a similear activity so he doesn't get burned out. Don't forget time to exercise and time alone!
Do you want to invite family? Linus is much more likely to want to speak in Norway if you fly his wife and kid out too, and give them plenty of time to travel to Finland.
Overall guest speakers are a lot of fun, and well worth doing. however they are expensive (More so if you have to pay the speaker and not just the travel expenses) and a lot of work. Don't try to do more then one or two a year, and don't let those who orginize it get bruned out.
I mailed the FSF about having a guest speaker for our student ACM chapter at the university. Much to my suprise RMS volunteered for the duty, as he was going to be speaking in Vancouver, BC around that time (which being only 2000 miles away is practically next door). If he's not in your area or arranging a tour he may request that someone else speak. His only requirements are that his travel cost be covered and he is taken out to a good dinner during his stay. (Beer and pizza is not an option, since he disdains both). The trip up here he actually stayed in my house, and was a gracious enough guest not to flay me for my non-free faux pas (such as having a prominent O'Reilly shelf in the living room). But, do expect to be challenged on any logical inconsitencies in any statement you may make, no matter how trifling they may seem to you. And be prepared for the anagram puns and spontaneous Bulgarian dancing in the living room. The actual speech ran somewhat long, about his AI lab days and the evolution to the GNU project, and the four principles of freedom. But it was informative if you could pay attention so long as that. There are transcripts of his speeches out there which give the general notion of what he will talk about. In general, a little research to find out who's in your area will reveal some notables in the free software community who might likely speak (excepting Alaska where you better be able to cough up the $800 airfare since the "local area" means Vancouver or Seattle).
His name was Robert Paulsen.
I remember reading from ESR's page that he'll speak for free just about anywhere as long as someone puts him up somewhere (preferably somewhere that doesn't suck, even a guest bedroom would be perfect). Just think, you could have ESR sleeping in your house! ;)
And he doesn't like to fly coach on long flights, but you shouldn't have that problem as he lives in Pennsylvania, fairly close to the Lehigh Valley area if I am not mistaken.
But if you're going to have anyone speak, you gotta get ESR.
And maybe you can invite RMS, but only to kill him when he gets there. =)
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
At a company I used to work for, a senior developer had just quit, and was giving "brain dump" talks to any who would listen. I honestly didn't attend these sessions intending to be inspired. But I was inspired. Not by any dynamic speaking quality, but by his sheer depth of knowledge of the stuff he had coded and his insights on programming in general. This speaker just had great subject matter, was enthused and knew what he was talking about. I would bet that there are a lot of people around like this, you've just got to find them. And I think listening to people like this is interesting and could be inspirational. Sure the group should have seperate activities, but a healthy balance of activities and speakers would be preferable in my opinion.
Hehe you get involved in one little book project and suddenly find yourself interesting.
Seriously, though, I love to make myself available to user groups when travelling, like I did when I came down here to Dallas in May for a friend's wedding (the fact that I found a job here and wound up moving back is another story). I suspect most authors, open-source-project-leaders, et al have similar attitudes: catch me when I happen to be in Pennsylvania (or wherever), and I'd love to give a presentation.
OF course, that makes it incumbent upon us (as potential speakers) to publicize our travel plans, a la Randal Schwartz -- something I'm guilty of neglecting myself, and I should probably get around to updating. Taking it a step further though, that makes for a lot of work on the part of the program chair of a user group: you still have to wade through all of the homepages of each potential speaker until you find one who will happen to be in the neighborhood. Perhaps someone would like to undertake building a "Random Sightings" website where people who wouldn't mind giving talks while travelling could enter their travel info into a database (and prog chairs could subsequently browse the same)?
MOO;IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Inspiration isn't the only reason to have a guest speaker. Small groups have the problem that they tend to become homogenous and do things the same way. A guest speaker brings other perspectives, other experiences, new ways of doing things.
1. Contact Linux vendors (Redhat, Caldera, etc.). When I lived in Nashville, TN, we had representatives from Redhat at one of our Nashvile Linux Users' Group meetings and we had Caldera representatives at one of our Central Indiana Linux Users' Group meetings here in Indianapolis
2. Contact local Linux companies. Fortunately for us in Indianapolis, Ian Murdock (founder of Debian), works here in Indianapolis (he's President of Progeny Linux Systems)
3. Contact Linux developers within a few hours travelling distance. NLUG collected money to bring a window manager developer to Nashville from Alabama.
4. University community - Scores of students at my university were Linux users and probably would love to give presentations on their areas of expertise. Perhaps your campus has a similar concentration of Linux users.
Having hosted RMS, he expects that his lodging, meals, and transportation will be paid expenses, in addition to a speaker's fee (that's how he earns his living, for the most part).
However, he adjusts his fee to the economic means of his host and is willing (and appears to prefer) to have someone put him up for a night rather than incur the expense of a hotel room (though he is alergic to cats).
In short, if he's in your city anyway, and you're willing to put him up, it would probably not be a great expense to have him speak. I would reccomend though, that you permit him to collect donations for the FSF, or sell FSF wares if you can't come up with a reasonable (say $500) speaker's fee.
He is not as unreasonable as his reputation makes him out to be, is a great speaker, and can be contacted by email (Check the GNU website for an email address).
For the tech group, we invited people from Microsoft, but warned them that they will be shreded if they only brought marketing types.
We also provided Microsoft with a pool of beta people (when beta really meant beta). We had the founders NuMega, but had a little debugging tutorial first. We had the president of Knowledge Dynamics (Install Pro) give a presentation on compression. This included a presentation on his new technique which was to be included in the next version of the product.
You can expect some marketing, but you must let them know what is expected. They will also want to know the demographics of the group.
Fight Spammers!
As Executive Vice-President of the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Student Government Association (*waves to all the UAH /.ers*), I'd give you this to-do list:
Remember, just ask a poor, tired SGA EVP if ya need some help.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
I was surprised to find three women at last night's meeting but unsurprised to find that one was the non-technical friend of one of the others. Each of those two was 10 times more social than any other person (including the remaining woman). Unfortunately they were sitting too far during both dinner and presentation for me to talk to them much (and no, I wasn't going to hit on them).
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
I'm from Bethlehem, right near Lehigh, and while I won't pretend I'm anyone like ESR or RMS, I was asked by the Lehigh LUG to come speak last year. It would have been great because I could have stayed with my family and visited while on some company business.
/me shrugs. I suggest emailing your prospective speakers as a useful way of getting them interested/to show up :)
Unfortunately, the fellow from the LUG who emailed me never replied to my followup.
m.
Loki Software, Inc.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
I was involved with a local ACM chapter and LUG who co-sponsored an event (not in an official capacity, so I do not represent the views of either). We had several speakers, but ESR was the "draw". We had a tiny budget going into it, but did just have enough to fly ESR in and out. All the arrangements with ESR were finalized many months in advance.
As is the tradition, we decided to try to sell T-Shirts to help pay for things. I paid for these out of my own pocket. More on this later.
I happened to be the person with a car who had the lightest schedule that day (I'd only have to miss one class to pick him up), so as soon as my class was out I picked up the person who had arranged ESR's visit and we drove the 80 miles to the airport as quickly as possible.
When we got to the airport, we searched the airport from top to bottom. No ESR. We talked to a series of airline employees trying to find out if they had any idea what happened to him. About an hour after we got to the airport we finally got someone to tell us that he never got on the plane. After more inquiry to see if he had for some reason switched flights (he didn't) and after checking voice mail to see if he had let us know he wouldn't be there (he didn't) we drove home.
Then I spent about an hour trying to get him on the phone. Here's a little tidbit: most people who answer phones at VALinux don't even know who he is, and those who do don't have ANY idea how to get in touch with him.
I finally gave up and went to class. Later (much later) that afternoon, we finally got an email from him. His explanation was that he "forgot", but that if we would buy another ticket for him he still MIGHT be able to make it. This was about 16 hours before the symposium was scheduled to start. Even if we could have gotten tickets at that point, we wouldn't be able to afford them.
Being the honest people we are, we notified everyone that ESR would in fact not be attending. As a result, there are still 90 T-Shirts left over (anyone want to buy one?).
[Luckily, another person involved in the event (thanks Andy!) got a hold of someone to fill in (who did a great job), which combined with the rest of the talks we had made a great conference.]
Only pay for his trip, eh? Let's see:
Plane tickets: $350
T-Shirts: $400 - $100 for the t-shirts we actually sold
Other: ~$150
PLUS at least two people wasting 10 hours combined just on ESR arrangements.
What did we get? Not a damn thing. I'm still out $400.
Thanks a lot ESR.
I've made it very clear that my Just another convicted Perl hacker talk is available to anyone who can get a group together expecting 20-ish or more, with a suggested donation of any increased travel cost I incur. And since I'm always bouncing around the country anyway, the additional costs are often near nothing.
The Lexington Perl Mongers had a nice advantage, as we worked for different companies. Once in a while, Lexmark would bring out Nat Torkington (to talk? teach? not sure what the deal was), and we'd move our monthly meetings to concide with when he'd be in town.
We'd still have our planned speaker for meeting [talking about some random module / feature], but Nat also gave us a small talk about as to what was going on with Perl and showed us pictures of his kid, and all it cost us was keeping him in beer for the night.
If you increase your members, and they're varied [work for different companies, go to different schools, etc], you have a better chance of knowing when someone's going to be in the area anyway, and snagging them to come give a talk.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I have a baby at home and in general try to only take a trip once a month. I have recently had to turn down a user group, well in advance of the event, simply because my schedule got too tight.
I look with especial kindness upon speaking engagements that are willing to pay for my wife and child to come with me, and will in general go out of my way to give them more than one talk, etc. If we can do a bit of sightseeing around the thing, it becomes something fun rather than another out-and-back trip with me missing the travel days away from my family.
I always show up. Always. That's pretty basic responsibility, but some people get that wrong and make us look bad.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You won't accomplish "success" merely by breathing the air that ESR has belched, and the cost of arranging for a "celebrity" will far outweigh the value in most cases.
On the other hand, it is a good idea to pull in people with new and interesting ideas.
There are all sorts of interesting sorts of projects out there that it would be nice to discuss with one of those involved.
- People use XFree86; it would be interesting to hear about various aspects of it, whether about the technologies of the components, or about the way the project is organized vis-a-vis licensing, source code control, and "politics."
- My LUG's last guest speaker was the organizer of LiViD; he spoke on both the technologies involved, as well as the legal wranglings surrounding DeCSS. Most excellent.
If the goal is to feel important because we got Linus to come out, that represents a pretty crummy reason.It doesn't take Dirk Hoendel to discuss that; almost anybody on the team could have useful insights. Other members of the team might actually be on the same continent.
If the goal is to learn something, then it most certainly is valuable to get speakers from remote places so that the local group doesn't get overly parochial or provincial.
A good comparison here is with academic institutions where they try to pull in guests for seminars and lectures. This helps "diversify the gene pool of ideas," where the alternatives can tend towards a sort of "academic inbreeding."
(Grumble... I need to put together a topic or three myself; the last time I presented anything locally was my Internet Filtering talk of 1997; I should probably put a couple of generic talks together that could allow me to candidate for this sort of thing... Have laptop, will travel...)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Not a chance in hell. (Linus)
Not a problem at all. It's a LUG, so I will speak for free. Be sure of taking car of everything, I don't bring money, I don't use credit cards. Buy a business class ticket, the travel is long, you know, and I need to plug my RedHat/VA Linux notebook, I don't have time to sleep, evangelism is so hard. (Eric Raymond)
I hope not to find any commercial ads in the conference room. Don't invite ESR to speak in the same day. KDE sucks. Qt is evil. I know nothing about linux, I can talk about GNU/Linux. (Richard Stallman)
Do I have to talk about 3Com drivers? (Donald Becker)
Mamma mia, I won't be able, I am still implementing triple elevator algorithm with a single pointer buffer cache and page colouring. The I will spend my whole holidays correcting the bigs in my code and then a couple of week until I finish uploading them with my stupid 56Kmodem. Porca miseria, la madonna. (Andrea Arcangeli)
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Now I've just gotta get a similar group started in the town where I've moved...
If any of the Melbourne, Australia LUGs want somebody to speak on GnuCash, I'm available :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm the speaker coordinator for CLUE in Denver.
We get locals to speak. Generaly, we post requests
for speakers to the local email lists and at times
we solicit for speaker. There's little reason to
fly someone out when there are probobly interesting and informative resources right in your community.
In our LUG, anyone can do a talk and we divide our meetings up into two presentations: A KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) talk, which is a simple 30 minute introduction to some basic Linux area, and a main presentation which is usualy somewhere between 1 and 2 hours.
The KISS presentation is generaly done by and for newbies in order to get folks into presenting and to encourage participation. The idea is to introduce something and discuss a bit. Additional resources are given to help people to persue it on their own.
The main is usualy (but not necessarily) by an expert or guru and is a more detailed discussion.
Hope this helps.
Check out
http://clue.denver.co.us
Hang Loos and be cool
Plane tickets for ESR to forget to use: $350
Unsold t-shirts made to hype the event: $300
Gas and chow to fetch nobody at the airport: $150
Damage to your group's reputation: priceless.
[
Well, let me give you a quick run down of what happens at our CWRUlug (Case Western Reserve University) LUG meetings.
For the past two years we have scheduled weekly meetings. During these weekly meetings we have members of the group talk about some aspect of Linux, Unix, Open Source, etc. One week we'll have a talk about jargon, the next a talk about XFS and of course have the occassional Installfest. We use these talks in order to not only keep ourselves interested, but to bring new Linux users and Freshmen "up to speed" with what's going on in the Linux world.
Lately, we've seemed to attract someone "big" speakers... granted they aren't of the calibre of ESR and RMS, but it's still exciting for us. What we've been doing is in fact inviting alumni of the University working in Industry to demonstrate some of their Open Source projets, or to discuss coding techniques, etc. A lot of good sources are companies that folks have worked a co-op or summer internship for. Also, we ask faculty to present something relevant to the group. Finally, we'll ask local business leaders and companies if they'd be interested in speaking.
Want a really "big" speaker? How about combining efforts with another local LUG to perhaps entice a big name individual to come to town? Publicize the hell out of it and, if you're successful, it'll be a heck of a lot easier to get another speaker to show up.
So I guess my advice is this: Look local. You'll find a lot of capable individuals with a lot to say. It will help them because then they'll know who to recruit and it will help you because you'll know something you didn't before and might have the chance to work for a great company that embraces Open Source.
> (As a sidenote, why is there always one of those smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is
> wrong in any group of computerphiles? Somebody smack those idiots.)
Something like 15 years ago, I had the chance to meet Douglas Adams at a book-signing here in Portland. (Lookingglass Bookstore -- cool establishment, worth delaying the eventual trip to Powell's to visit.)
When I arrived with the 3 volumes of his Hitchhiker's trilogy for him to autograph (the fourth had yet to be published), I noticed that there was a chorus of 3 ``smart-alecky geeks" standing to one side, in awe of him. (I had the impression that if given the sign, they would have fallen to their knees & recited parts of the book to him in prayerful supplication.) Needless to say, they were there only because he could not summon himself to demand they be chased away.
(For the curious, Adams is quite taller in Real Life than he appears in his photographs. He wore a leather jacket, & looked rather athletic to me at the time.)
When it came my turn for him to autograph the books, I got to ask him two questions:
Question one: ``So what did you write for Monty Python?"
(The liner notes for one of the books I owned had claimed he had worked for Python et Co.)
His face brightened, & he explained that he had worked for Python for only ``a lunchtime" at the bequest of Terry Gilliam, who apparently was a friend of his. It was just something his publicist had elaborated on, much as publicists elaborate about Bill Gate's programming skills.
Encouraged, I asked my second question: ``So will you write another book in the series?"
At this point, he lost his smile, & his interest in me. I forget exactly what he said, but it was along the lines of ``maybe".
``And you'll explain the story of the creature Arthur Dent keeps killing in each reincarnation?" I added, desperate to reclaim his approval.
``Yes, yes," he murmurred, already attending to the next person in line. As far as he was concerned, I was just another one of the chorus of ``smart-alecky geeks" he didn't have the feck to have chased away.
Since then, I have seen how authors throw up an amazingly artificial & off-putting persona around themselves when they meet their readers. I'm sure that Adams was doing roughly the same thing to me all of those years ago. But if I had to put a moral to my little (& doubtlessly off-topic) story, it would be this: you will always be a ``smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is wrong" to someone. So when you are presented with such a creature, deal nicely with this person, for he/she is simply trying to gain your approval in the only way he/she knows how.
And if you figure out how to do this successfully, please let me know how to do it.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
We booked ESR to several talks here at ITESM Monterrey, in Mexico in a 3 day span. He never missed one and we had some really big audiences, nearly 800 people attended his live talk and 1500 people saw a interview with him through the remote learning system (satellite tv broadcast) of the university. As you can see, this was a really big risk because of the large audiences, the high priced international flights, the fact that handguns of any kind are forbidden in my country (no, there are no licences to carry a gun either), and his big appetite for spicy mexican food.
He of course had a talk and hang out with the local LUG. Even released a new Fetchmail version right here from my home network. He never, at any moment, forgot any part of his schedule.
Anyway, if you have any experience making these kind of events you should know already that this things happen quite often, and most important, you should call your speaker two or one day before the day of the event.
The people who are common speakers at events like this have the tendency to be very busy people, you _should_ know that, and if this thing happened to you, in part is your fault, not ESR, because if you had established a good relation with your speaker, this thing would never happened.
I dont believe you are making a proper judgement on ESR, and, more important, Who the hell are you to judge Eric ? Eric as far as I got to know him, was a all-around nice guy, and that's the impression he left to most of the local LUG members.
Francisco Romo Alfaro
President, ITESM MTY Linux User's Group
This week at ApacheCon Europe I listened to Ralph Engelschall (mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, etc) speak. He was speaking in English, which (seeing he's Swiss) must be his third or fourth language. He was talking about SSL and security, which is a deep technical topic. He was lively, witty, inspiring, fun. He obviously enjoyed himself. He obviously knew his topic inside out. And he was able to communicate both his enjoyment and his knowledge.
I think what it comes down to is the meritocracy. Ralph Engelschall, like Alan Cox, got to his position in the meritocracy because he produces exceedingly could code ('damned cool voodoo'). You need to be pretty brilliant to produce code at that level, and many (though not all) pretty brilliant people are good speakers.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
If you live in a metropolitan area, chances are good that Open Source or Free Software "luminaries" will be in your area from time to time.
Having a good web page that is listed on GLUE is a good first step; it lets them find you.
If a conference of any sort is going to be in your area, check the guest list, and email any that appear interesting.
Don't be afraid to ask your members if they know anyone; the Orlando LUG got Ian Kluft to come speak that way, and unfortunately we had to turn down Chris DiBona but he contacted us because of a VA staffer in the LUG.
Don't be afraid to email anyone; the worst they can do is delete it unread, and you haven't wasted much time in that case.
That being said, don't be a cheap bastard, either; if your LUG can afford to pay for speakers, do so. Otherwise they might have to start charging for software to make a buck.
Oh; and watch for businesses in your area that may be in the Linux arena, they aften have contacts you don't, and will probably have interesting speakers on staff.
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