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Present Around Our Worlds

James Shaw
We are now into a new round of Present Around The World (PATW) competitions in which groups of our younger members each make short presentation at various centres around the world.


I wonder if there is scope for adopting this format and extending it to the wider membership?


We are fortunate that there are people prepared to give presentations at local centres that last around an hour. Usually they are 'up to the minute', informing us about new advances in technology. That tends to restrict presentations to those 'on the leading edge'. However there must be many interesting aspects of technology that might be routine to the specialist but that are unknown to the wider population. There must also be many people with a good tale to tell but who haven't got the resources to stage an hour long event but who would be quite happy to work within the ten-minute format of PATW, especially if was more a chat or conversation rather than a competition.


What I have in mind then is that local centres should stage an event where several members agree to do a short talk each, so as to make up a session equivalent in time to a normal event. There doesn't need to be a competitive element, the aim is to be encouraging, not intimidating! Not only could such an event be interesting to members but it could 'open the window' to schoolchildren etc. as to the range of activities that make up the various 'worlds' of engineers.


Any thoughts?
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    Barry,

    I hope if the idea is tried out whoever does it will try their best to make a success of it but how can they be assured of success?


    At the moment it has been proposed that I present the idea to my LN committee, which is an essential first step if it is to be attempted on my 'home turf', (but please don't let that put off anyone else trying it elsewhere!).


    Assuming I can get approval at the committee level ideally we would have to get some measure of interest from potential presenters and audience. One feature of the PATW format is that usually each competitor brings along some supporters, the more competitors there are the greater the chance of getting a decent sized audience and hopefully that effect would also happen with a multi-presenter PAOW event. Earlier Steve mentioned the Adestra tool and that might be a means of getting a measure of interest, (I'm not familiar with the tool).


    I think you are right that different types of event are worth consideration. That might be as simple as widening the range of topics, I've given the example of historical topics before but I'm sure there are others. Different types of events could well need a different model altogether. I imagine that our typical LN events started from the idea of the 9 to 5 engineer turning up straight after work, the format worked so it was kept. But is it the best format for attracting school children or even college students? Are there other 'audiences' that would attend a different style of event held at a different time?


    It is the nature of experiments that they sometimes fail but we may be able to learn from that and do better. That would be part of your testing process. If an idea can be shown to work well then it should be 'packaged' and offered to other LNs.
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  • 0
    Barry,

    I hope if the idea is tried out whoever does it will try their best to make a success of it but how can they be assured of success?


    At the moment it has been proposed that I present the idea to my LN committee, which is an essential first step if it is to be attempted on my 'home turf', (but please don't let that put off anyone else trying it elsewhere!).


    Assuming I can get approval at the committee level ideally we would have to get some measure of interest from potential presenters and audience. One feature of the PATW format is that usually each competitor brings along some supporters, the more competitors there are the greater the chance of getting a decent sized audience and hopefully that effect would also happen with a multi-presenter PAOW event. Earlier Steve mentioned the Adestra tool and that might be a means of getting a measure of interest, (I'm not familiar with the tool).


    I think you are right that different types of event are worth consideration. That might be as simple as widening the range of topics, I've given the example of historical topics before but I'm sure there are others. Different types of events could well need a different model altogether. I imagine that our typical LN events started from the idea of the 9 to 5 engineer turning up straight after work, the format worked so it was kept. But is it the best format for attracting school children or even college students? Are there other 'audiences' that would attend a different style of event held at a different time?


    It is the nature of experiments that they sometimes fail but we may be able to learn from that and do better. That would be part of your testing process. If an idea can be shown to work well then it should be 'packaged' and offered to other LNs.
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