[PLUG] Conferences, Powerpoint, and freedom

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Fri Jul 26 07:04:12 UTC 2013


I am scheduled to speak at the IEEE Sustainable Technologies 
Conference at the Lloyd Center Doubletree on Thursday morning
August 1, next week.  This morning, the conference chair sent
out an email saying that all presentations must be Powerpoint,
the first time this imperative demand has been made of me.  I
use my own open source tool, wydiwys, because I can navigate
faster and do Q&A faster with the hierachical presentation
menus built into my tool.

I have presented Server Sky at thirty conferences over three
years;  although I've often done so among a sea of Microsoft-
only presenters, I've always got my machine swapped in and
running in a few seconds, sometimes with an assistant so I
could talk through those few seconds.  I could use an assistant
on Thursday morning. 

I've even presented this way at the Microsoft Conference Center
back in the day when Linux did not autofind the projector and
required rebooting.  It was fun showing the Ubuntu splash page,
then a presentation with features Powerpoint can't duplicate.
The microsofties present looked a little green.

The conference chair may prove intransigent, perhaps physically
restraining me from moving a VGA connector, or cancelling my
talk.  I hope not.

But, if this happens, I imagine we could have great fun if I
instead did the presentation across the street in Holladay
Park, with the open source and other radical communities
swelling my audience.  Perhaps inviting the papers and the
TV media, getting some attention for open source and the
M$ monopoly.  

That is way too much work for me to set up, but if there are
people looking for a CAUSE, and willing to organize permits and
handle press relations and print flyers and stuff, I'm willing
to make the presentation that way.  I have a kilowatt portable
generator and a too-small-to-be-useful-outside projector.  To
make this go we will need to borrow a Really Powerful Projector
to work in tree-filtered daylight.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993



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