Category Archive: Uncategorized

1. How to present at MeasureCamp

   November 20, 2023 11:04 am 2 Comments

   Presenting in front of a group might seem daunting but it’s one of those skills that gets better with practice. MeasureCamp is a supportive community of like-minded data enthusiasts so you’ll find a friendly audience for your talk. MeasureCamp relies on the community to fill the schedule, so think about doing a talk!

   

   You’ve decided you want to share your knowledge. Where do you start? You’ve got 25 minutes to present your wisdom, though you’ll likely be asked questions so trim down a little.

   25 minutes isn’t enough time to do hands-on training but you can give people an overview of your topic that builds their mental model of what you’re showing. That way when they get home and look at other material, they’ll understand the key concepts and know what the specific terms mean.

   The rooms each have screens with standard connectors (HDMI), wifi will be available and the larger rooms have microphones. You can show people anything you like but most start with some slides, perhaps switching to a live demo if there’s something cool to show.

   It never hurts to practice your talk a few times. You can do this in a private room to yourself. Don’t forget to track the time it takes. If you can find someone to sit in and watch, even better. Just the practice of talking to a real person helps and they’re likely to give you some feedback.

   Speaking is rewarding

   

   Getting up and speaking in front of an audience has many benefits. You’ll gain confidence in your public speaking ability with practice, a superpower that will help throughout your work life. Being in front of the audience turns you into an instant expert and has enormous career benefits.

   Commercial plugs

   If you’re a vendor, whether a product or a service agency, be especially careful with commercial messaging. MeasureCamp is an UnConference. One of its biggest strengths is that sponsors don’t get automatic high-billing speaking slots to tout their wares.

   

   If you’ve got some genuine knowledge to share and it happens to use your product, cool but keep your audience in mind. If they don’t walk out with useful knowledge, you’ve failed. If you’re not sure, talk to the MeasureCamp organisers and we’ll let you know what side of the line you’re on. Yes, this includes MeasureCamp sponsors!

2. How do I run a discussion group?

   11:03 am Leave a Comment

   

   Part of the magic of MeasureCamp is that there aren’t keynotes or vendor presentations. The sessions are run by people like you. But they don’t just get there by magic. Attendees get ready for MeasureCamp by thinking about what they’d like to share and preparing material.

   How to run a session at MeasureCamp

   Soon after we kick off the morning at 10am, the Session Board opens up. Then people start writing up and placing cards on the board to mark out their session. The board rapidly fills out.

   The cards get moved around to ensure high demand sessions end up in the bigger rooms and to balance things through the day. I often move my cards a couple of times when I find there’s a clash with another session I really want to see.

   

   When the time comes around for your session, get ready and set up the room. The Google offices have excellent AV equipment so you should be able to plug in with the usual standard connectors. Though projecting slides is by no means mandatory or the only way to run sessions.

   After a few minutes of people moving around, you start your session. It’s up to you how you run it!

   Running a discussion session

   

   Sessions don’t have to be “person stands at front and presents from slides” type talks, though there are always plenty of great talks in that format.

   You’ve got a high concentration of smart specialists interested in analytics, measurement and data. You can use that to solve problems and learn stuff.

   One of the best sessions I went to a few years ago was when an analyst from a broadcaster hosted a discussion on “measuring engagement”. She started the discussion really simply, asking people how they measure it and what problems they had. The group was self-selected as people interested in this topic, so an epic and high value discussion kicked off. Brilliant!

   So if there’s something you’d like to know, or a debate you’d like to hear all sides of, an informal discussion can be a great way to go!

   If you’re planning a discussion, they often work better in the afternoon when people have warmed up and perhaps aren’t quite as fresh for intense learning like they were in the morning.

3. What should I expect at MeasureCamp?

   10:58 am Leave a Comment

   MeasureCamp Karachi is coming up at 10:00am on Saturday 10th February. MeasureCamp is an UnConference which is a little different to events you might have been to before. What should you expect?

   If you’ve just realised that you can’t make it, release your ticket now so somebody else can come along! We have lots of people on the waitlist keen to come and it’d be a shame for them to miss out. To release the ticket, search for the email from Eventbrite and follow the link labelled “View and manage your order”. If you can’t work it out, email us at karachi@measurecamp.org and let us know.

   What’s an UnConference?

   

   The big deal with UnConferences is that they’re participant-driven. Instead of having expensive keynote speakers and a bunch of sponsors filling up the schedule, we start with a blank canvas in the morning. The session board starts wide open with space across the available rooms for each 25 minute timeslot.

   What happens in a session?

   

   The sessions end up being filled with a wide variety of different styles. A high proportion of sessions are prepared talks where you guide the audience through a topic you know in detail. Another popular format is the panel or debate style session, either a small group of experts up the front discuss a topic or a more roundtable approach where everyone gets to discuss a topic of interest.

   

   Some sessions mix it up into a combination of talk and discussion. Another common style is to do a demonstration of a cool technology, product or technique. You stand up the front and show people, generally on a laptop, what you find cool. We ask that sessions aim to be genuinely useful for the audience, so hold back on the salesy demos.

   

   Finally there’s the outliers: the weird, the wacky and the fun sessions. As the day wears on, some odd things end up on the session board. One year we had two people doing the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test live on stage.