Why you should participate in your local user group

A local user group is a great place to gain some practice.

Local user groups are usually a friendly environment and events are free to attend. In contrast to commercial events where people pay for attending, not everything has to be that professional and it is OK to act on an amateur level.

There is no need to fear that you are not professional enough. No one will throw rotten tomatoes on you if you lose the context or need to go back to repeat something. In my experience, user groups are very helpful environments and people will be happy to help.

User groups usually have all types of members, professionals but also beginners. There need to be advanced topics but also beginner friendly topics. Talk with the organizer, tell them your topic and the difficulty level. It is up to the organizer to find the right mix for an event.

All topics, also beginner topics, are great. So do not fear what you can present might not be advanced or interesting enough.

I guess every one is nervous before speaking in front of an audience. I am definitely, so you are not alone. But it might be possible to get used to be nervous and maybe lose the fear.
The way to this is: Give talks.

And again, the local user group might be the perfect environment to train such a situation. Usually they are friendly and helpful environments and so there is no reason to fear the fear, enjoy it.

It does not need to be perfect!

Luckily SwedenCpp has group members that do the creation of video, which is an extremely lucky situation for a local user group.

It enables to share content and information also to outside the group and also allows speaker to do some analysis of the given talk. I do not know how it is for others, some people say they never watch their talks. I find it very helpful to see myself talking. I hope, and I think it will, help me to improve my skills and that the next time I do a presentation I will be a little bit better.

If there is no chance for a video, do not take this as an excuse. You still have the chance to get feedback from the people listening to you. This can also be very valuable.

You can also use your mobile phone to do an audio recording. This works great. There are plenty of free audio recording apps, just try one. Start it, put the phone in front of you and record you talking.

Additionally you can do a screen recording from your desktop while doing the presentation. There are many screen recording software tools available, just search for one. Together with the audio this is nearly as good as a video.

For me it is strange to hear my voice and to see me talking. From a lot of other speakers in our user group I know they feel the same about their talks. It seems the reaction 'OMG, how horrible' is natural for some people when they see themselves on video, even if they give excellent talks.

So do not fear your recording and trust others if they tell you that you are not that horrible as you think :-)

It is of course some work to prepare a presentation.

Maybe more for some than for others. Some people claim that they do their presentations the day, or even the night, before the talk. I cannot do this.

For me, preparing a talk is usually quite some work, but I also enjoy it very much. Collecting information, bringing it into some order from which I think it makes sense, review and improve. I did this several times for several topics during the last years, and every time I am surprised how much I learn about topics I thought I had some solid knowledge of.

I am not the fastest in preparing talks. What about you?

As you can see, beside giving talks there are also other roles, like helping with video/recording, user groups can need help with. The organization of an event, finding event hosts, pizza sponsors, …​.

If you think you can provide some help and would like to do something, just talk with the organizers of a group, they will for sure be very thankful.