DemoCamp 13 Tomorrow

The 13th DemoCamp — the regular show-and-tell gathering for Toronto and area’s developers, businesspeople and creatives — takes place tomorrow at No Regrets Restaurant and Lounge (42 Mowat, not far from the corner of King and Dufferin). The presentations start at 6:30 p.m. and run until about 8:30 p.m., after which the social part of the evening begins.

Here’s the lineup for this DemoCamp:

1. Invited: Mike Beltzner — Mozilla (15 minutes)
2. Invited: Betsy Weber — TechSmith (15 minutes)
3. Break (10 minutes)
4. Demos – 5 minutes each (these should not be sales demos)
   1. Opensource Game Platforms
   2. SneakerPlay
   3. NotSoSo
   4. ViaVol
   5. ProductWiki
   6. Bart G

David Crow has a message for presenters, and I concur:

These presentations should not be sales demos.

Demonstrators should read Value to the Audience.

I am also going to ask that every presenter create a blog post or page on the wiki that is linked from their sign up that answers the following questions:

• Have you attended a previous DemoCamp?
• Who are you? Previous experience, what makes you qualified for us to listen to, etc.
• What does your product do?
• What hard problem, interesting insight, or cool feature will you be demonstrating?
• What are you hoping to get out of presenting?
• What does the community gain by hearing you present?

Basically, we need to improve the quality. I’m thinking of following the Ignite Seattle model of having all presenters submit a PowerPoint presentation. The point is not necessarily to use PowerPoint at DemoCamp, but to make the slides (and we’d limit the number, say 8 slides) available before the talk to the community.

For goodness sake, you have the attention of people in this community for 5 minutes. Make it count. And if I have to sit through a demonstration of a tag cloud or web login form, so help me…

See you there!