• Build two different themes – You prepared your slides and tried them some days before on your office projectors (maybe waking up half an hour in advance so nobody could see you). But, when you present, you notice that the quality of the projector lamps is very poor and some contrasts are difficult to read. This is a problem especially for presentations that don’t make use of white bullet points on black backgrounds (or viceversa) but slides with sentences spread in different positions or text put over a photo. The risk is that the “special effects” you spent your nights on are invisible to your audience and that they can’t connect all the dots of your speech. Prepare two set of them (you can use both Keynote or Powerpoint) so that a version is highly contrasted. If, once on stage preparing, you find out that it’s difficult to read your slides, you can easily switch to the highly contrasted theme. Sure, you can use high contrast from the start, but chances are that if you spent hours refining your work, high contrast could not have the impact you wanted. In this way, you have an easy backup strategy. Moreover, you don’t have to prepare two themes every time, because once you define the theme that satisfy your needs, you can use it for whatever presentation you like.
• Put you Twitter username on every slide – When I was on stage at Better Software, the audience begun twitting excerpts from my talk. Unfortunately, one tweet contained a wrong username (avolpon instead of AntonioVolpon) and the following retweets and new tweets all preserved the non-existant username. So, if you can, if it doesn’t “ruin” your design, reserve a space where you repeat you Twitter username on every slide, and don’t limit this only to the first or last slide.
• If you build a story, wait for your audience – I am a big fan of Made to Stick, and since I read it I try to build a story in every speech I give, when it’s possible (at Better Software I presented my various job opportunities, starting from the military service). Be very careful if the story is mandatory to understand the meaning of your talk. If so, and your presentation starts after a break, or if the audience can choose among different concurrent sessions (and so needs to move from a room to another), I suggest you not to insert the story in the very first slides, but to (reasonably) wait for most of the people to enter and have a seat.

The success of this initiative has to be equally shared between organizers, speakers and the ones that filled the rooms.

The organizers set a simple, yet winning formula:

• 20 minutes for every speech including Q&A, without possibility of overrun
• final session with 5 minutes speeches without questions in order to attract hesitant and shy people
• explicit request to speak English (in Slovenia, differently than in Italy, they speak a very good English)
• breakfast and lunch for free and t-shirt for 10 euro to fund the event
• evening party

Everyone has to be rewarded for being an active part of the conversation with hundreds of questions, requests and speeches rarely commonplace.

A barcamp that gives many suggestions to Italian organizers of similar events:

• organizers followed most of the events in the first line, rather then limit their appearance for public relations;
• they give up the idea of streaming the event (an expensive and unnecessary option considering that a barcamp is made of many concurrent conversations) and decided to allocate resources to improve the attendees experience
• speakers developed their presentations to last for few minutes but, more importantly, to give a starting point for the discussion. It’s easy to state that a barcamp is not made by a passive audience, but it has to be possible for attendees to easily join the conversation

All this without astronomical sponsors or guest starts.

• We yet have to see the consequences of this economical crisis (during the panel Getting financed in a recession)
• I hope the market will fall down till people understand what has real value (Paolo Coelho)
• Recessions give new opportunity. During recession times it’s harder to be finances, but you have less competitors too
• Solo-leaders would have not built the web (David Weinberger)

If you ask venture capitalists here at Le Web 2.0 if bad periods await us during the next year, most of them don’t deny say no. They are not alone. Paul Coelho is on the same wave lenght.

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Market clearly picked last year, but then prices started to fall.

Recent investments were:

• networks go niche (the updown, kindo, visible path)
• advertisers get smarter (adinfuse, smaato, consorte)
• everything goes mobile (mystrands, sreamezzo, betnow)
• return of professional content (tvtrip, videojug)
• media becomes immersive (superscape, payfirst)
• shopping gets social
• software in the sky

What next?

There is still lots of activity (such as stupeflix, floobs, rummble, second brain). Plus, Europe is getting connected

Key strenghts in Europe:

• social applications
• mobile/3g
• data creation
• first class engineering

Weakness:

• fear of failure
• smaller local markets
• need more 2nd and 3rd enterpreneurs

On the positive side:

• ability to deal with diverse markets
• mobile
• state support for startups

Mobile helps change the rules

Coelho thinks that privacy, from the book author perspective, should be stimulated. People can’t read online, so they download books but eventually buy the printed copy.

For this reason he decided to put on his site some full texts so that one can “pirate” his books. He only owns the right for the Portuguese version: sometimes readers translate books that are not translated yet.

Being tolerant about the usage of his books let him sell more.

The goal of every writer is to share his works.

He is sure that a period of recession will make people understand the real value of free and of the social networks and new ways  of communication.

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The idea of music and love go well together. Love, in particular, is an easy object for music. When you just love music everything is easy, but when you have to play music it’s more difficult. Even more difficult it is when there are many people that play and that you have to coordinate, or to conduct, such as in an orchestra.

Conductor in French is chef – and the meaning is similar to winner. The job of a conductor, however, is not just to lead, but to connect people through happiness. And connect not only the musicians, but also the audience.

Talgam showed a movie clip in which the conductor Carlos Kleiber doesn’t just lead the orchestra, but shows his feelings and leaves space for the whole orchestra to add value to the performance. And he doesn’t forget the audience too (and that’s not easy, especially if you are in Vienna). This is an act of love.

Compare it to classical conducting, for example Riccardo Muti. This is a different kind of love. It’s love for order. In the movie clip Muti tells everybody what has to do. Players  not only know the orders, but also the sanctions.

Kleiber instead doesn’t tell them what to do, but how he feels about the music. He opens up space for them to give interpretation. It’s about the meaning, it’s a process, not just instructions.

How to make love and keep things in control? If you are in charge in a process you need also to have the authority when somethings go wrong. In this way you are able to tell someone that he is out of line (another movie clips showed how Kleiber does that).

Kleiber is able to give space to the different elements going forth and back on the orchestra scene.

The feedback he gives to his orchestra are the kind of feedback you would like to have when you cook something for the ones your love.

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• sociality
• understanding
• meaning
• information
• bits

The process starts with lot of informations and tends to reduce it. When information is reduces is more manageable.

Bur reducing information so that it can be standardize means that, when applied to a person, the person becomes “boring”. That’s because we’ve been required by information to throw out most of information in order to be able to manage it.

That is changing. Nowadays (Facebook for example) there is a lot of information, but also a lot of links, created without control. There is alot more of information than during the age of information. While the age of information reduces hyperlinks, this new age of information connect and emphasize

What about leadership? Leadership as we know it is based on scarcity. Consider for example Jack Welch. It was a great leader and the CIO of General Eletric. In this context leadership is tied to scarcity. Leadeship itself is scarce.

The leader is the only one that has access to all of the information in the firm. And for him to succeed he keeps the information scarced for the rest of us. But the leader is overwhelmed with information. it makes decisions like a computer, garbage in, garbage out. This id the information-based model of leadership. In thi way there is also a scarcety of people, just one isolated figure that decides, communicates, coordinates, has vision, strategy, is accountable.

It’s not natural that one person can do it, and it fact’s he doesn’t do it very well.

Compare this with crowdsourcing leadership. In this context the job of the leader gets ditributed over the network. In an environment like that decision making is a failure of leadership: if you put decision on the top that is a sign of failure of the network.

That’s why solo-leaders would have not built the web

Leadership is a property of the network, not of the individual.

Weinberger introduces also the meaning of “adundant governance” with examples taken from the recent US elections. Change.gov, the site released shortly after the election, is not perfect but they are changing and improving it every day.

This leads to the “reputational democracy”, a new level od democracy that did not exist before. This democracy is very dependent on very little tiny choices: small change can have huge repercussions.

So what will leadership be in the future? It’s very difficult to know, because there are so many forces into play (myth, power,ego,collaboration, money, generational change, tradition, realism, institutions).  We cannot predict it. Weinberger hopes that the notion of the leader will go away.

There are great leaders, but they are too scarce. leadership embraces abundance of connections.

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Lots of empty words.