Simon Willison's Weblog: meetings

Quoting Michael Lopp

2019-12-03T13:34:45+00:00

Let’s agree that no matter what we call the situation that the humans who are elsewhere are at a professional disadvantage. There is a communication, culture, and context tax applied to the folks who are distributed. Your job as a leader to actively invest in reducing that tax.

— Michael Lopp

Tags: meetings, rands, management, remote, leadership

What honorarium is befitting for a guest speaker apart from money?

2013-08-01T09:00:00+00:00

My answer to What honorarium is befitting for a guest speaker apart from money? on Quora

Here are a few ways you can treat your speakers really well.

Pay for their flights and a good hotel (with an extra night either side of the conference so they can relax a little).

Have a car (or an organiser in their own car) pick them up from the airport.

Lend them a smartphone with a pre-configured data SIM in it for the duration of their stay (even better: make sure wifi tethering works on it).

Throw a really good speakers dinner at an excellent local restaurant.

Tags: conferences, meetings, quora

What is the best way to notify participants of a planned meeting?

2013-07-30T10:31:00+00:00

My answer to What is the best way to notify participants of a planned meeting? on Quora

Google Calendar invites work really well - they're sent via email and are reasonably usable even by people who don't themselves use Google Calendar.

Tags: meetings, quora

Product Demonstrations: What's the best way to view/demo a website offline at an event?

2012-09-03T15:17:00+00:00

My answer to Product Demonstrations: What's the best way to view/demo a website offline at an event? on Quora

If this is a static website (just HTML, images, CSS and a bit of JavaScript) you might be able to get it running on your laptop using a web server. OS X prior to Mountain Lion had a built in Apache which could be turned on using the "Web Sharing" option in the Sharing preference page, but it looks like they've now removed that option - a way of turning it back on again is described here: http://clickontyler.com/blog/201...

I don't know what the state-of-the-art for this kind of thing on Windows is these days - you can certainly download a Windows build of Apache and use that.

A simpler option is to just have the web pages and all of their contents available on your local disk, and load them in your browser using the "Open File" menu item. Getting this up and running requires you to save the files in a way that correctly re-wires the CSS/Image references to be local paths. Your site might already be built for that to work, but if it's not you can either use a webpage archiver tool (wget is a basic command-line one, more advanced apps are available for various operating systems) or use your browser's equivalent of Google Chrome's "Save Page as ... Webpage, Complete" feature. You'll need to repeat that for every page that you want available offline though, and you'll then have to edit the pages to get the links between pages to work - which will be a lot of hassle.

The simplest option might be to take screenshots of every page and combine them in a PDF file or a Keynote/Powerpoint presentation. If you want to get fancy, you can even set up "click" areas in the presentation around the important links which cause a slide with the other page to be displayed.

Another simple option is to open-in-new-tab all of the pages that you want to demo and just switch between them in a browser. The downside of this is that if your computer crashes or someone closes the window or closes a tab you'll lose the ability to display the page!

Tags: conferences, meetings, speaking, quora, meetups

If I'm eating during an evening meeting (where a full food spread is available for 20 meeting attendees), how do I know how loud my chewing and crunching is? Am I disrupting the meeting?

2012-09-03T11:58:00+00:00

My answer to If I'm eating during an evening meeting (where a full food spread is available for 20 meeting attendees), how do I know how loud my chewing and crunching is? Am I disrupting the meeting? on Quora

It's probably fine, provided you eat with your mouth closed! If you're really nervous about it, politely and discretely ask someone.

Tags: meetings, quora

Quoting Rands

2007-08-31T17:50:31+00:00

A meeting must fight to exist. It must defend its existence to its attendees who should constantly be asking "Why are we here?"

— Rands

Tags: meetings, rands