Heckled by the Open Source crowd?

Boy, guess this proves that even at Open Source conferences you can get heckled a bit. While it has been a long time since I have done any public speaking, I can still feel for anyone who is heckled while trying to give a talk.

I am sitting here in the EasyInternetCafe in the middle of Amsterdam (because the hotel access is so god damn expensive and I refuse to fund the hotels bandwidth) reflecting on what has been a busy day at the conference which started off great and never failed to deliver.

The interesting format here is that no one person is given anymore than 20 minutes to pontificate about anything; myself included! Even the keynotes, they squeeze 4 speakers into one 2 hour slot complete with question/answer sessions for each one. It is format that while a little frustrating for speakers, is a joy to the audience who don’t get an opportunity to be bored by the current speaker. Scott Handy (from IBM) opened the conference with his keynote and on his slides he noted they purchased Gluecode for the skills, driving home the point that IBM supports open source in many different ways.

My talk went okay, feeling rushed it took me a wee while to get into my stride. The primary reason for this was I was suddenly very aware of my own voice and wanted to make sure my english came over as clear and precise as possible to a largely European audience. I was paying to much attention to how I spoke and not about what I spoke that I made a goof and ended up being ‘heckled’ from the floor. LOL. [Read the rest]