Judging by Content, Delivery, and Bravery

I'll look at your 300-word abstract, or the one-liner the conference has given you, or your slide deck, or your video, or your performance, and I'll make an irrational judgement*.

Trying to rationalise my judgement, I think that I favour the following:

• Content: if there's something specific that I want to use
• Delivery: if I'm having fun
• Bravery: if you're pushing yourself somehow

I'll favour something with more of these qualities over talks with fewer, and my mood at the time dictates whether I favour one over another.

There are also turn-offs. I don't, at all, favour teases (especially if I'm being asked to judge) and assume that if you won't tell me your meaningful content, you don't have much. If even your summary stinks of LLM-generation (or, in earlier days, is littered with letter errors), I'll imagine that you're not going to pay much attention to your delivery, either. And while I admire chutzpah, I abhor bullshit manifesting as bravery. Boo to you.

An experience report pretty-much always has usable content somewhere, and can be packed with bravery if candid. An interactive workshop lets me play, a performer makes me delighted, and a proper story catches me like a big old rusty hook. I'll give my attention to a brave new speaker even if all they have are old truths, but an old hand had better have really good stuff or at very least be weird.

`* Judgement is a feeling. And it's also a measured dissection of the situation, its context, and the regulations that apply to arrive at a binding decision. These two things are different: That's how language works. I recognise that I feel attracted or repelled by a talk, I don't think that I should trust the feeling without some thought, so I try to take it apart to see how it works.