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Guidelines for Speakers

Welcome and thank you so much for joining us on this year’s conference. Here are some guidelines to help you prepare your presentation.

How will the
presentations work?

We found out that the best method is to prerecord the presentation beforehand in order to avoid technical problems or too much stress for you. On the event day we playback the lecture’s videos and at the end speakers and participants move on to a Zoom meeting for Questions & Answers. In summary:
Steps for making the lecture

How can we assist you?

If you are comfortable with the technologies, you can prepare the whole presentation on your own style and send us the final result. Otherwise we can assist you through the process. We can help you compose the images and other media in a slide presentation (PowerPoint or similar), and we can record your lecture via a Zoom meeting, making it as easy as possible for you.

Rules for the presentations

Please limit the presentation to about 15 minutes.

The attention span on web conferences is much smaller than on real life ones and it is very easy for participants to get distracted, so we must keep the presentations short and compelling. If you have more important material to include, we can postpone it to a final version to be available later, or we can prepare an entry for Q&A that will allow you to approach it.

Please respect the deadlines.

If you need our assistance on building slide presentations or any other work, please contact us and send the material as soon as possible. Of course we understand unexpected delays, but please do not leave it to the last minute, because after speakers complete their presentations we still must have time to process them, make the necessary adjustments, add subtitles, and organize everything, besides all the tasks on the conference organization. Our good will is unlimited, time is not.

Suggested guidelines for the presentations

Use images

Holding a token in front of the camera is a good move, but hard for the viewers to notice the details.

Show the context of the tokens.

Just listing a lot of tokens is interesting in a catalog kind of way, but the biggest beauty of the tokens are the stories behind them. Explore the time and place they were in usage, and include unusual facts and anecdotes to captivate the audience.

Tell us something we don’t know.

If you are presenting a regional theme, it is probably best to choose one that is less common in the rest of the world, or has stories that make it unusual. If you are focusing on a more generic theme, you may captivate a wider audience but probably they will already know a lot about that, so try to include the singularities, unheard stories or novelties.

FAQ

Get in touch with us as soon as you realize you do not have enough time. We will make our best to make it work with the material you have already prepared.
Your priority should be to write the text, followed by gathering the necessary images. With that on hand and a 20-minute Zoom meeting with you, we will surely be able to prepare a decent presentation.

Of course! The lecture is yours, and you are welcome to do it on your own style. Just keep in mind that a coin showed on hand often gets unfocused and always makes it difficult for the audience to appreciate the details. Our suggestion is that you send us a picture of the token and we will make the cut on the video to include the image while keeping your voice. If you have some unusual requirements, please get in touch with us in order to make sure we can all deal with it.
A slide presentation is not mandatory, although pictures are strongly encouraged. If you do not have the means or the knowledge to do it yourself, it is OK, you are only required to have knowledge on the tokens. Just send us the pictures and text you wish to add, and we will do it for you. But we must ask you to send it as soon as possible, so we can have the time to assist you properly.

You can video record your lecture using a webcam connected to your computer and appropriate software. An easier option is probably using your mobile phone. If you have the knowledge to do it yourself just go ahead and do it on your own time and degree of perfectionism.
A tip: If you are using a recent version of Zoom, you can use it to record yourself (just do a meeting alone) and you can even have a PowerPoint on the background at the same time.
Our suggestion is to schedule a Zoom meeting with us and we can assist you on the process. If you prefer, we can record you on Zoom and add your images or slides afterwards.

Different participants are used to different accents and most do not have English as their first language. Even if you work for BBC, chances are someone will misunderstand you at one point or the other. Therefore, we will include subtitles in every presentation in order to maximize the understanding for all the participants.

No alteration will be made to the content of your presentation unless you want us to.
On the spirit of assisting you, we may add at your request images, video, sounds, a full slide presentation, or whatever is possible and agreed between us.
The final video will have subtitles, may have to be converted on its format and compression, and may have a few introductory seconds added before and after your presentation. But no content alterations.
In addition the final video will be sent to you for final approval before being used on the conference.

Your name will always be associated as the author of your lecture in any form of presentation.
In order to keep everything legal and transparent to everyone, we will ask you at some point for some explicit authorizations. The first one listed below is essential, otherwise we cannot include it in the conference. The remaining ones are optional and you can choose to be left out of those initiatives.

  • (indispensable) Permission to present your final lecture video on the conference, as well as the images or media you choose to include. (Please respect copyrights, too)
  • (optional) Permission to leave the video available for everyone to watch on our YouTube channel after the conference is over (not including Zoom meetings and Q&A session).
  • (optional) Permission to publish your presentation’s text and images on a Proceedings Book after the conference. An electronic version of the book (in pdf) will be offered for free to every registered participant and on the main supporting Forums/Groups. We may also make it available on paper (probably on a Print-on-Demand service) with a small margin of profit in the attempt of raising some funding to cover costs on next year’s conference (for instance hosting a proper website and Zoom meetings). To be clear: this is a non-profit organization (in fact it has personal losses for the organizers) and any funding we may get is used for the current or following conferences.
We give the same importance to all the speakers, so the order of the lectures is by the time zone of the subject or the speaker, from east to west. At 15:00 UTC is midnight in Tokyo and 8:00AM in Los Angeles. With this order we will allow participants on remote time-zones to be present at the lectures that probably will interest them more, before going to sleep, or after waking-up in the morning.

Get in touch with us by E-mail: TokenConference@gmail.com