Open Source Leadership with Vicky Brasseur

That works in all levels, right? So I started this out by saying that like you were kind of influential in my presentation style and I actually looked at your list of presentations.

You were prolific at Open Source Bridge and my memory is not prolific.

So I don't even remember the topic, but I remember the thing that stuck out to me was at that point, I think I was doing a lot of the no-no of writing your talk notes in your slides.

And then you're like reading your slides to people, which is not good.

But I walked in there and you had an approach I'd not seen before, which was you had a slideshow that I believe had nothing but memes in it.

Like we're talking 2000, 2010 there, a text on Instagram.

image memes, not AI generated stuff that and you had them rotating like every 30 seconds.

And it was somehow always lined up with what you were saying, like not exactly.

But if you were like, you know how we feel about businesses and open source or something like that, you might would have had a video of like someone like slightly rolling their eyes come up as like your next slide or something.

And I thought that was really interesting.

And so I wanted to dig a little bit here and kind of ask the question about like.

You know, what made it where that was an approach that you wanted to take? And and like, is that maybe one of the arrows in your quiver? Is that maybe representative of a strategy you use across the board? Or, you know, hey, that was ten years ago.

Maybe maybe you've got even even better clues as to how to go about it today.

Well, as a matter of fact, no.

So my presentation style has evolved a great deal, but it's still the underlying principle is what can I do to best deliver the information to my audience? Who is my audience? What language do they speak? Be it jargon or, you know, human spoken language.

What are they looking to get out of this? You know, how can I make this worth their time? because time is the one thing you're never gonna get back once you spend it.

So I need to make sure it is absolutely worth their time.

So I have to prepare, I have to be practiced, I have to be delivering information in a very clear way with takeaways that they can actually do something with.

And back in the day, years and years and years ago, when I was doing the one picture and then I'm speaking under it, To be honest, the primary reason for that is that while you're looking at one picture that is somehow related to my talk, I am reading and performing my notes like a script.

And it just I could not do it otherwise, because I have a mind like a steel sieve and everything will just go.

Plus, I tend to run off at the mouth.

So if I don't have these guardrails of my notes, I'm just going to go off and la la land and go off script.

So we can't have that.

But my talk has evolved a lot since then.

And I do workshops now to teach people how to Create and present good talks.