Many speakers in the software development community have begun to take advantage of the SpeakerRate.com site to gather feedback from conference attendees about their performance. I'm an enthusiastic supporter, too, because I think that gathering constructive criticism about our performances is as difficult as it is important. Attendees are often too shy to say what they truly feel in person or they are just too busy during a conference to spend time filling out evaluation forms. This web site allows attendees to rate speakers by both delivery and content, another aspect that's often overlooked when soliciting feedback. Great content with poor delivery requires a completely different kind of remediation than does the opposite set of symptoms.

Another great feature of SpeakerRate.com is the ability to organize talks into sets across speakers. Event organizers can use this feature to very quickly set up an evaulation system for an entire event, making it easy for conference attendees to find and rate all of the talks they attended on a particular day. One great example of this is the CMAP Code Camp for Fall 2009. The organizers of that conference did a great job getting most of the speakers to set up accounts and post the materials for their talks there. The catch to making entire conferences work via SpeakerRate, of course, is that all of the speakers must have an account. And that's my call to action: please check out SpeakerRate.com and set up an account. Whether you're a speaker or a conference attendee, having an account there will enable you to participate in the processes of soliciting and providing feedback. And, just so you know, I have nothing to do with the SpeakerRate.com site other than having an account there. I don't even know who runs it. I'm just a fan.

Check out my SpeakerRate Page