Visibility begets more visibility, in my experience.

Jared

I wonder if people have different expectations of events that select speakers in the three different models; and how that might impact people’s feedback (how their impression matches up to what they anticipated).

Again, ratings without any qualifications of the raters isn’t very helpful. I’d like to know how individuals that interest me (are in my audience) give ratings and ignore the rest.

There are three basic models of speaker solicitation

1) Conferences ask for solicitations: These are things like the IA Summit, where a call goes out and, theoretically, the previous history or the quality of the presenter plays a back seat to the quality of the submission materials and the interest of the topic.

2) Conference seeks out great presenters by reputation: Here the conference organizers look for people and then let them speak on whatever they’d like to talk about. They market the conference by the reputation of the presenters.

3) Conference seeks out important topics by qualified presenters: In this model, the topics drive what presenters are chosen. The presenters still have to be great, but a great speaker that doesn’t match the topic will be rejected.

Our events are in the last category. There aren’t many events that follow our model, so it might not be something your resource would want to cater to. The first two models are far more commonplace.

It feels like what you’re thinking of is more geared to helping the reputations in the second model. You could provide a resource of posting calls, to help the speakers learn about the first model conferences.

Just a thought…

Jared

I can definitely see the value of the testimonial for that purpose. I wonder how inclined people are to write a testimonial (short? long? – Essay like a restaurant review or sentence-length like a Netflix review or eBay feedback?)

I think it would be powerful to combine that with numbers/ratings – perhaps asking people to pick from a spectrum of inspirational to technically applicable (or something like that) would be an additional way to assess the type of presenter/presentation.

Hmmmm…

It’s an interesting idea.

I like that I could see the topics and slides, though, in the Gar-Reynolds-Presentation-Zen world, slides are just images and titles and don’t really tell you what the presentation is about.

The ratings aren’t that useful to me, since there are lots of great presenters who aren’t appropriate for our events. What I’d be more interested in are testimonials that tell me who the attendee was (do they match my audience?), what they learned (was this topic interesting?), and how they applied it after they learned it (was it useful?).

Of course, these criteria are important to us. Other conferences that focus on more inspirational speakers are going to look for different criteria. We like inspiration, but want presenters who have deep, real-world experience that can really talk to a topic that is important to our audience.

Hope that helps,

Jared

Here’s my idea: Imagine, for every conference or event, a speaker has a profile in X location (similar to GeekSpeakr). At the end of their talk, they upload their ppt to slideshare (note: partnership potential). and people can rate how the presentation itself was on a number of criteria (depth of knowledge, quality of ppt presentation, delivery, etc — the aspects you mentioned you look for in a good presenter).

With that you can have a speaker evaluated on a specific presentation/event, but aggregated across several events (specially interesting if they present on one topic multiple times), and even across several topics (and get a general sense of how good they are as a presenter, regardless of the specific topic).

You could even extend the cloud of info around the presentation by aggregating external references (twitter buzz, blogs buzz, etc, a la Lou’s UX Zeigeist)

The value of this information would increase over time (as it accumulates) because it would become richer with volume — aggregated amounts could also benefit from an algorithm that decreases value of very old presentation evaluations. (numbers could be simple averages or could be weighted to create an index, I’m not sure).

Finally, speaking and getting evaluated frequently would be highly encouraged because it could keep your “rates up” which make one more likely to be invited to speak again (by folks like you) and consequently, inspiring folks to speak more and more (addressing the core issue I’m trying to tackle with not enough women speaking).

What do you think?

Problem is, as a conference producer looking for fresh talent, it tells me virtually nothing about the talent that I might hire for one of our events.

I was hoping I’d see details about the topics and the depth of the speaker’s expertise. I need to know who is truly an expert that can talk to our audiences about the important topics.

How do we build a resource that brings that to the surface?

Jared

But seriously, any suggestions are welcome and appreciated!

Hack on,