Poll: best speaker ever
November 29, 2007 3:39 pm freesoftware, General, guadecI’m making up an aspirational list of people I would like to invite to keynote at GUADEC, and I’m interested in hearing about past experiences.
Who is the best speaker you have ever seen at a technical conference (not necessarily a technical presentation, mind), and what was the subject?
Answers in comments please, the winner gets a big sloppy kiss next GUADEC from someone of my choosing. Maybe Aq.
November 29th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
My all-times favourite is Jdub, without any doubt. Always bright, funny, enthousiast : brilliant. I was also astonished by Michael Meeks (at FOSDEM 2006 or 2007) but he was a bit too in some technical arcanes.
November 29th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I was thinking more along the lines of people outside the GNOME community…
November 29th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
arsehole. 🙂
Hugh Daniel from FreeSWAN was inspirational when I saw him speak about the state of open source software, but that was at HAL2001 and I’ve got no idea what he’s been doing for the last six years.
Apparently Apple have a guy called Jobs who is a good public speaker. 😉
November 29th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Definitely Damian Conway.
I saw his talk at EUROOSCON 2005 entitled “Fun with dead languages” and it was absolutely brilliant, fun and interesting, though.
He even made a rock-star-like funny parody of Web 2.0 cxap entitled: “openTalk 2.0 – Maximizing Non-stakeholder Buy-in by Leveraging Depatented Generic Information protocols”. I cried out of laughter.
On the same day, I saw Cory Doctorow’s talk. It was utterly brilliant, too. This guy has got a dozen of ideas per second.
November 29th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Not sure why I didn’t add his name to the list of potential keynoters but without doubt the most consistently amazing speaker I’ve seen is r0ml, aka Robert Lefkowitz. You know how Peter Parker got his spidey power by being bitten by a radioactive spider – well r0ml was bitten by a radioactive library. Just check out his stuff on IT Conversations and you’ll see what I mean – although you really need the slides sometimes.
November 29th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
One that was surprisingly good and funny was Rob Curley at OSBC. I say surprisingly because I didn’t know who he was and I wasn’t expecting a newspaper guy to have much to do with open source but he had some amazing stories of enabling really useful cool things with open source. (I guess I should have expected good story telling from a newspaper guy now that I think about it!) I still remember most of his talk which is pretty impressive.
November 29th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Maddog.
(Hmm, did he already keynote for us once?)
November 29th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Clearly, it was Katty Sierra at GUADEC 2006 about creating passionate users.
Best. Presentation. Ever.
November 30th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Yeah, Katy Sierra’s talk was awesome.
Mark Shuttleworth’s talks are cool, too, but for the content. So their quality depends a lot on whether he has something to say.
I only watched it on Google Video, but I enjoyed Linus’ git talk a lot. Plus, I think it would be great to have him rant one hour about GNOME in a GUADEC keynote.
And I’ve heard Randall Munroe is a great speaker.
But talks are generally more interesting when the topic is relevant. So I guess it’s better to invite speakers that have something to talk about than people that are good at talking about nothing.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I second Cory Doctorow. He’s a great speaker, always has lots of interesting ideas, and is a professional writer who is a great advocate of Creative Commons. I think this video is a good sample of the sorts of talks he gives:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/020jun06/features/video_doctorow/
Also, he’s a longtime Mac user who made some waves when he switched to Ubuntu a while back. I don’t think he’s followed up about it since then (though I think I saw him say that he’s been using it the whole time, just hasn’t gotten around to mentioning it). So he quite possibly has been using Gnome all that time.
November 30th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Travis, Cory Doctorow apparently uses gedit to do all his writing now, so I guess it’s safe to assume he uses the rest of GNOME too:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/16/droid-sans-mono-a-sw.html
December 1st, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Kathy Sierra was a great speaker. Give her a hug from us since she resigned from public live!
December 26th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.