[Talk-us] OSM Ignite Talk - N. Colorado

[Richard Weait]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Mike Thompson <miketho16 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have signed up to do an Ignite talk on Open Street Map in Fort Collins
> Colorado on Thursday Feb 28th 2013.
>
> For those of you not familiar with Ignite talks, you get 20 slides and five
> minutes to talk about your topic.  The slides automatically advance every 15
> seconds.
>
> 1) If anyone has done one of these before, or has any advice, it would be
> much appreciated.

First, it's "OpenStreetMap".  One word with many capitals.  Compare to
the globe; one world with many capitals.  :-)

I've done many OSM talks and other talks, and only one ignite format talk.

The ignite talk was really hard and really fun.  Since your talk is in
February, I suggest that you start now.  Really.  Draft something and
rehearse it in a mirror, with the slides auto-advancing.  I had no
idea how quickly five minutes would fly past until I started my
rehearsals.  In other talks, I can take time to catch my breath, or
search for a word;  try that in an ignite talk and suddenly you are a
slide behind.

Also, once you get a handle on how short five minutes is, you'll want
to re-write your presentation, then rehearse and revise again, about a
dozen times.  So, really, yeah.  Start now.  :-)

As with any OSM talk, you can't cover everything.  There are just too
many different ways to approach OSM, and too many ways to contribute
and / or consume the data.

Do you know anything about the audience you'll have?

For a general audience, I'd want to try to reach a potential mapper,
so I'd go with something like:

1) OpenStreetMap is the wiki map of everything
2) Where wikipedia has volunteers writing encyclopaedic articles for
everybody to read
3) OpenStreetMap has volunteers surveying their neighbourhoods for
everybody to see
4) Mapping the whole world, one neighbourhood at a time sounds crazy
5) and it really is crazy
6) but it actually works
7) mappers survey a shop or park or bicycle trail
8) and use editing software to send the data to OpenStreetMap
9) then everybody may view the data as tiles
10) or render the data as turn-by-turn instructions
11) or render the data as tactile maps for vision impaired
12) or render the data as midi-songs
13) ... something something, and six more slides.