I am quietly pleased that my abstract has now been accepted for oral presentation at the World Congress in December. It seems I am limited to 10 minutes which might be a challenge in itself!
Andrew, over on Conductive World, notes that this is a reduction from the previously advertised time of 15 minutes. Reading this put me in mind of something I read very recently.
What is the optimum length for an oral presentation at such an event?
Quite apart from anything else, it's short. Each speaker has just 18 minutes to sum up their life's work or their big idea and even if your talk is about how you intend to create artificial life within five years.... you have 18 minutes and not a minute more.
The genius of this, according to Bruno Giussani, European director of TED, is that "it's too short for an academic to do their standard 45-minute presentation and too long to improvise. You have to prepare and have to take a fresh approach. It really puts pressure on them."
Or, in other words, the same old shtick will not work. Speakers have to come to TED with a new shtick."
[TED is an annual event bringing together visionaries from a range of fields - an ultimate forum for blue skies thinking - that 4 years ago went online. Check it out on YouTube: try Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus for instance. Or, one of my favourites, Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?]
Anyhow, I'm now trying to work out how to fill my 10 minutes. Old schtick or new schtick? If Bruno Giussani of TED is right, the World Congress would be more likely to get "new shtick" from 15 minutes rather than "old shtick" from the allocated 10 minutes.
Interesting, yes? Have a listen to Clay Shirky.
---------------------------------------------------------------
This post is copied on twitter. The hash symbol (#) in the subject line of this post identifies a twitter hashtag for the World Congress. If others use this hashtag for all tweets about the World Congress, all tweets will be aggregated and searchable thereby. (#7WCCE)