Preparation

What topic to choose?

If you have the possibility to choose from a variety of stories, the one that is the closest to you will be the best one. Agile Warsaw is a large community (over 3,000 people) and every topic will be interesting for some subgroup. When you are talking about topics that are close to you, it will be easier for you to engage the audience.

Title

The title should be in the same language as your talk or workshop in order to avoid audience disappointment. So far, there are no many foreigners who do not speak Polish, but when sharing a recording on YouTube that may not be taken for granted.

Meetup.com limits the length of the title to 80 characters. Excluding the title number #XXX_ there are 75 characters remaining.

Selection of participants

Sometimes, especially for workshops, the number of atendees must be limited. Then there are two ways to make a selection: by the order of registrations (first came, first served) or manually based on the answer to the question asked during the registration.

Meetup can take care of the first came, first served version autimatically. It usually takes less than an hour to fill in a workshop so we will ask you when to announce the meeting.

Manual selection:

Participants are given a question while signing up for the meeting. There can only be one question.
After answering the question (250 characters maximum) people join the waiting list.
Around 2 days before the meeting, you will receive the waiting list from the organizers with a request to put participants in a preferred order.
The list has to be sent back to the organizers in the early afteroon. Organizers will remove participants who have a history of “no shows” from previous meetings and publish the list of accepted participants.

The timing of the last two steps is important because communication to accepted participants needs to be done in advance. If a meeting is scheduled for Monday, you will get the waiting list on Friday morning. Organizers will expect the list back by 2:00 PM at the latest.

If you do not follow the process, participants will be chosen randomly or by registration order. The meeting will happen, but, both your and our effort will be wasted.

How long can I speak?

There are no specific restrictions. Most of the speakers talk for about an hour. Preparing a shorter talk is usually more challenging however it is better received by the audience. The shorter it is, the more room there is for discussion with or between attendees. Maybe it doesn’t not have to be a traditional talk at all…?

We are trying to record each talk at Agile Warsaw, to preserve them for posterity, but it is not a must. Sometimes the topic is too sensitive for recording, sometimes the camera increases speakers’ stress level too much.

At the venue

It is invisble to a great extent but coordination of such a meeting requires synchronization of many different details.

Time

Come at least 15 minutes before the scheduled time of the meeting

Equipment and slides

So far, we did not have to do a talk without slides, but several times the presentation was saved by the laptop of somebody from the audience.

try to have adapters for the projector: the projector may have VGA or HDMI input.
off-line slides: there may be no internet connection on the site (some buildings block the signal)