Dear speaker at Copenhagen Critical Care Symposium 2021.
We’re thrilled you’re making it over to Copenhagen in real life. So much better finally to be able to meet in person.
Below are a few words on the format of the conference, our tech requirements and some thoughts on presentations and sharing of your talks.
On the Conference
This is the third iteration of the Copenhagen Critical Care Symposium and from the outset we have aimed to do things in a more engaging way than previous. We’re all part of the FOAMed ethos and the new style of more informal, interactive, down-to-earth presentation style promoted by SMACC and other modern conference formats in its wake.
We have put some effort into setting a stage with light, backdrop etc and have deliberately worked on a programme and structure of the day with slick transitions and attention to detail with regards to audience experience in session and out.
You might get a feel for the style of conference from this video although it’s in Danish.
We have defined our audience target group to include everyone who is in contact with the critically ill patient from prehospital through resus in EM over ICU to discharge. All provider roles and medical specialties involved are important and we have seen a substantial cross section of providers from paramedics, techs, nurses and doctors.
We have hard core medical updates interspersed with more general topics like human factors, education, leadership, culture etc.
While a lot of the content has been in Danish from local experts, we’ve had English speaking key note lectures from people you will recognize. You can check programmes from previous years and talks here on the scanFOAM site that we use as our FOAM outlet (2018, 2019).
You will find that Scandinavians are quite good at understanding and speaking English and the interaction should not be hindered language wise, although we don’t expect you to understand the Danish lectures. You should not need to shy away from audience interaction.
We expect a mostly full auditorium with about 200 people.
Thoughts on presentation
We know you’ve been part of the online conversation and are seasoned veterans on the conference circuit. We imagine that you’ve heard a few words if not many already about how to succeed with presentations.
That is not something we’ve been able to expect from all speakers. We have spend a good amount of time running presentation workshops with Ross Fisher whom we imagine you know and have tried to share his teachings with our speakers in previous years to avoid the worst of death by powerpoint.
We’ve shared some thoughts with them this year too, but will spare you the long version.
The short version: What we hope is that you will inspire primarily with the spoken word and the power of your message and be mindful not to compete with that message by using too many slides and especially wordy or data heavy slides that, in effect, will detract from your impact.
The audience will read, or listen. Not both. That is the science.
If you want to remind yourself of the evidence behind and get some pointers on how to succeed we might suggest these resources.
Ross’ website.
Lots of good posts. We can recommend starting with How to do a presentation and this case study of him preparing for a talk of his own.
Scott Weingart
This post nicely illustrates the work behind the success of the man and his EMCrit site. That stuff doesn’t happen at random.
Tim Montrief
While revisiting this topic we happened on this tweetorial with 10 tips for better presentations which we found excellent. If you’re the twitter kind you can find more convo on the topic of presentations at #presentationskills and #htdap (how to do a presentation).
Tech and online side of this
The conference is being livestreamed and recorded as we want to help you put your message out as effectively as possible. We intend to edit and upload the talks in a more polished, shareable format after the fact. The aim is for the audience to be able to dig a bit deeper after they go back and to help empower them to make change by allowing them to rewatch and share in their departments and networks.
The talks will be made freely available as FOAMed as in previous years.
To help the digital version be as impactful as possible we would like to share your talk along a short synopsis from you of the key messages, a short bio, any slides you’ve used and, if meaningful, links to further reading or online resources.
You will get a preview version for approval before the edited version goes online.
If you’re happy for this, it would helps us if you’re mindful of copyrighted material whether visual or auditory as youtube will otherwise strike us.
We advise that non-consented patient identifiable case material not be included as it may easily spill over into the online domain whether from us or the audience.
On the question of tech:
- you will be mic’ed
- there will be a conficence monitor with presenter view before you (if you have slides)
- to make our signal chain less of a worry you can not present from your own device and we can only accept powerpoint, not keynote. We are sorry if this is a pain, but we have tried and failed. We are happy to help you convert
- we need the slides preferably a few days in advance to make sure it plays well and to not have too much last minute prep. Please send it through (potentially as a download link from dropbox or similar) to [email protected] along with a short bio, synopsis and any further links in case you are happy for us to pursue an online version
- be mindful to save it with any video and audio files embedded and make sure to also embed fonts so it doesn’t look messed up on our presentation laptop. Tips here
That’s all. We look immensely forward to seeing you in Copenhagen in a few weeks time. Please reach out about any of the above (same email as above)
Scandinavian paediatric anaesthetist / intensivist.
PHARM, ED, OR, ICU.
Digital MedEd
Co-founder scanFOAM.org
Co-organiser CphCC & TBS-Zermatt (aka The Big Sick)
Medical lead REPEL (resilience in pediatric emergency life support)
Web dev SSAI.info
