Guidelines for Presentations

As discussed in our hackpad brainstorming session, a major goal of our workshop is to learn what each other is doing in order to most efficiently collaborate on building the software tools we need and avoid duplicating effort. This is the rationale for having individual presentations.

Presentations should be 15 minutes long with 5 minutes for questions. Your presentation may cover whatever aspect of your work you feel is most relevant to the goals of the workshop. For example, you might present an overview of the xarray-based python package you have developed for analyzing GCM output. Or you could talk about a particular computational challenge you want to solve to reach your scientific aims.

Here are some suggestions to make the most out of our individual presentations.

• Keep in mind that we have an audience with many different backgrounds at this workshop, from atmospheric scientists, to oceanographers, to hydrologists, to physicists-turned-software-developers. Within these categories, experience levels also vary widely. Keep your presentation simple, clearly introducing unfamiliar concepts, acronyms, jargon, etc.
• If you present on an analysis package, clearly state what problem your software aims to solve. If you present on a specific model or scientific problem, clearly state what obstacles you face in accomplishing your scientific goals.
• Upload your presentation to the web somewhere (e.g. slideshare) so others can easily review it.

You may prepare your presentation in powerpoint, keynote, PDF format, or online slideshow. We will try to load all the presentations onto one laptop to save time, but since the workshop is small, we will be flexible about this.