Writing the Nerd Journey Session for VMware Explore 2022

Last updated Sep 19, 2022 Edit Source

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We had a well-attended session at VMware Explore 2022. The process of building the content was greatly aided by practicing the Smart Notes process we’ve been reading about. You can see our connected notes at graph.nerd-journey.com We “sold-out” the pre-registration with 130 registrants. We had 77% of those seats filled (instead of the 50% we expected), and got extremely positive feedback with 1/3 of the eligible attendees leaving feedback. That feedback included some constructive areas we could improve, so we’re excited to refine the both the content and our process. We’d really like to share that process here; Maybe it will help you write your next user-group or conference session better and faster than it would without that process!

We originally submitted …

Our second chance came from …

We’d long been discussing how to make our content more connected and discoverable. We knew we had the tools, we knew it would enhance the experience of our audience, and we hypothesized that it would make insights more discoverable. So we went for it.

Obsidian is a tool that John White had come across in his dive into the Zettelkasten personal knowledge mangement system. We’d be re-introduced to it by Josh Duffney when he returned to discuss his book, How to Take Smart Notes in Obsidian in episodes Episode 156 and Episode 157.

Nick Korte had been writing the show notes almost since the beginning in markdown, the native Obsidian text format. That made it simple for John to copy/paste the show notes from OneNote into an Obsidian vault.

There was some work getting guests properly tagged, along with show-to-show references.

We also had to create notes about the repeating patterns we saw, and pulled every significant reference from a guest into the overall pattern note, along with a summary of what they said.

There was a refinement step where we made each note leaner in the people we quoted and the heart of what they said

There was an organizational step as we put the notes in the rough order we thought they made sense, then realized that some of the ideas were subpoints of other ideas. For example, “participating in community” was part of MOC - Show Your Work for Job Excellence which was a supporting action for the top-level point of MOC - Becoming a Top Level Individual Contributor.

The refinement process began what we thought of a writing the content for the session. We refined how we’d tell the story, which points were main points, which points were supporting points, who to quote, and when to quote them.

Early on we wanted to make sure that we were emphasizing the value of the collective experiences of our guests. That meant that we had to quote them. And that meant that we had to introduce them and give a brief bio. We made the decision to have that be something we spoke while we had the point we were making on the slide. In retrospect, it interrupted our speaking flow to constantly refer to the information. John even got mixed up who he was quoting at one point. It would be easier to have the guests and bios on slides as we speak about what they said.

We included the knowledge graph on our slides, a visual representation of all the notes, their connections, and where the particular point was in the graph on the slide. However, we didn’t do a great job of explaining what that visual representation was before we did it, so the value of that effort suffered.

We broke our MOC - People Management Career section down to introspection (it’s a compltely different job, characteristics of good managers), and actions (talk to your manager about your aspirations and study for the interviews like you’d study for a certification exam). But we didn’t do a good job of saying that up front.

We found using connected notes extremely useful in content creation. The process, however, is most useful when you’re capturing written content early. When we read How to Take Smart Notes, we were asked to imagine a process of writing content which would be much easier than creating from the blank page: Ideas for content were easier, just look at the areas which were most connected. Content outlines were easier, because we could just drop note title links in a rough order, then re-organize the high-level flow of our topics in the way we wanted to tell the story. We missed on the benefit of having already-refined blocks of content, as we weren’t doing that until the session was approved. However, from this point forward, we’ll be looking at continually refining the patterns and ideas we see from our guests, and sharing them with our subscribers.