The new Lotusphere Show n Tell Track. A view from the inside (ish)

Last year Gabriella
Davis and I got talking about
the limitations of the Hands on sessions.  Having presented one in
the past (on integration of portal with domino), it was frustrating for
the instructors and the delegates that we could only offer limited seats,
as the logistics of having laptops for hundreds of people, and managed
VMs were a veritable nightmare.

We discussed this with one of the organisers
of Lotusphere (Kristin Keene) and suggested an alternative session type,
where there are no laptops at all but the session topics, speakers, and
format are aimed as classroom-type session.  Nine months later and
the "new kid on the block" is born, the SNT track.  The
track manager for this is Christian Holsing.  And today we can make
public that Gab and I have been asked to assist in session selection.  Very
quickly, Gab and I are starting to get a new found respect for the work
done from the inside, with regards to track selection.  There have
been lots (I’m not sure if I can release the numbers yet) of submissions,
and we have a lot of work to do in choosing the ones that will work the
best.   I come from a technical teaching background and Gab, well,
em knows everything so we should be able to help out.

So, what type of session are we looking
for?

The SNT track is different to the other
tracks.  For example, the infrastructure track, you can demo/discuss
something new and funky, same goes for the dev track.  In the strategy
sessions, you can bore people to death and in the BP track you (read: Bill
and I) can rant and rave and impart
real world knowledge.

The SNT track is very simple.  Consider
it a classroom.  You, as a speaker are to teach a topic from start
to finish, very very well.  Your documentation should be good enough
that people can do it themselves, step by step, when you are gone.  It
doesn’t have to be something new.  It just has to be something that
people may find difficult, and you believe that you can teach fully, and
impart full knowledge.

This makes it a very challenging session.
 I can imagine that the slide deck on a session like this would be
at least 100 slides (in a session I submitted, the first slide is "turn
on computer"), so the work required by a speaker in advance of sphere
is going to be intense.

Over the next few weeks, Gab and I will
say what we can about the track, and if you have questions about it, feel
free to contact us or comment here.  Of course, one thing we are NOT
going to do is discuss selection of sessions, so don’t bother trying (Kristin
has outlined what will happen to us if we do, and it aint pleasant).