Winter 2009 Presentation Guidelines

Introduction

Student presentations for Open Source projects will be held on April 24. You will need to prepare a 5-7 minute presentation (no more, no less) and submit your presentation materials in advance so that they can be loaded on a presentation PC.

Presentation Materials

Slide Deck

• Your presentation must be between 5 and 7 minutes in length.
• Your deck will consist of a minimum of 6 slides in OpenOffice.org Impress format (ODP). You may prepare your slides using PowerPoint or another tool and convert them to Impress format using one of the computers in the CDOT area. You may alternatively choose to use Slide Share.
• The six required slides are:
  1. Title -- Include your project name, your name, and your e-mail address.
  2. Introduction -- State the problem which you set out to solve (feature to be added, program to be written, bug to be solved)
  3. Approach -- What was your approach to solving the problem?
  4. Process -- What happened while you worked on the problem? You had multiple iterations -- what happened at each milestone? Did you go down the wrong path and have to start over? What barriers did you encounter?
  5. Discovery -- What did you discover and learn during the process -- about the technology, the open source process, the community, yourself and your abilities, collaboration?
  6. Results -- What did you end up with? Did you solve the problem?
• Your slide deck will be loaded onto a single presentation computer (to avoid problems of switching computers, configuring video outputs, and so forth).
• Design your slides to reinforce your message. They should add punch to what you're saying, and help the audience understand the flow of the presentation. It's OK to have just one word, a phrase, a quotation, or an image on a slide.
  • Do NOT design your slides to be read.
• Add additional slides as desired.

Screenshots or Screencast

If you would like to give a demonstration of your project, include screenshots in your presentation, or record a screencast of a demo (there are many tools for doing this).

• If you include screenshots, embed them into your slides.
• If you create a screencast, use Ogg Theora format -- if you record in a different format, you can convert it on the CDOT system Ireland.

Remember: your presentation cannot exceed 7 minutes, and technical difficulties in your presentation will be counted against you. Have a backup plan, and test things before you do it live.

Deadline

Your presentation slides must be submitted to your professor by April 22. It is a good idea to submit them in advance so that you have time to incorporate any feedback he may provide.

Presentation Day

Please plan to join us for the entire day on April 24. If you have other exams, discuss the exam schedule with your professor in advance. Students of DPS913 have an exam the morning of April 24th from 9:00-11:00.

Presentation Order

TBA -- the order of presentations and times will be listed here soon.
Nino D'Aversa, John Ford, Jesse Valianes (I may be forgetting others) are writing the DPS913 exam from 9:00-11:00, as such afternoon time slots are preferable. Patrick Lam needs to work that day, as such one of the earlier/earliest slots are preferable. Chinmay has another exam at 11:30 so anything, except between 11:30 to 1:30, is preferable.