I’ve mentioned before that the best keynote I have heard was an Apollo astronaut who talked about being in space and not about building a CLEC. Since then I have been very aware of what I believe a good keynote is as compared to a good track talk.

In general, a keynote talk should be entertaining and informative. And if it is controversial so much the better. But the informative part should be on a cleanly defined message. Using story as a medium, the listener should be able to remember the main point without having to take any (or very few) notes. That is a good heuristic for keynote talks; look around at people’s notes. If there are lots, then it is trying to pack too much or the point wasn’t defined well enough.

I’ve not done an ‘official’ keynote [yet] but I would say that speaking at TASSQ counts as meal audiences have the same audience elements. The slides and notes from that are here. The point of the talk was that ‘testers notice suff’ and in hindsight I should have stressed that a little earlier as the talk is full of lots of little stories with lessons learned resulting in lots of notes. But [I think] it is an entertaining talk and that makes up for it. And its not a boring drone of numbers and facts.

Boring drones of numbers and facts do have place at conferences though. And that is in track talks. Okay, maybe not boring drones, but the need for entertainment is a lot less in the track talks. Lots of detailed information and in depth analysis of problems and their eventual solutions (or invitation of solutions) should be done where the audience knows exactly what they are asking for.

I’m writing this in a plane 38000 feet halfway between Toronto and Denver on my way to Star West where I think there is going to be 5 sessions billed as ‘keynote’. If past conferences (in general, not just Star) is any indicator, I would guess that one, maybe two will meet my criteria as a keynote. The rest will be track talks delivered in front of a captive audience by people who have ‘paid their dues’ on the speaker circuit.