The IEEE Oakland East Bay Communications Society invites proposals for presentations at its monthly meetings. Topics of interest can cover a wide range of communications subjects. Examples include optical, wireless, IP protocols, IEEE 802, voice processing, messaging and collaborative communications tools. Please visit our Past Meetings page for a list of recent presentations.

Product sales pitches are not desired. Discussions of a technology or application topic can include information on products in the marketplace, including those offered by your own company.

If you are interested in being a speaker, please call our Vice-Chairman to discuss your topic and the development of your abstract and a brief biography. Alternatively, you can send an email to our Chapter address, oeb@comsoc.org. All proposals are reviewed by the Executive Committee, which meets once a month (usually before each member meeting). Speaker and topic selection is finalized approximately two months before the actual presentation date. For example, the March meeting selects the speaker for May and beyond. This is necessary to meet the deadline for submitting the meeting announcement to the San Francisco Bay Area IEEE Grid as well as provide sufficient notice to our members to plan their calendars.

What Excites the Audience

Presentations that receive favorable comments have the following characteristics:

1. Provide information not generally known to most of the audience
2. Our members prefer a moderately technical presentation with equal emphasis on the technology and its application in the real world.
3. Please avoid a direct sales pitch for specific products. It is fine to include general information about a company and its market niche, preferably later in the presentation. Areas of interest may include:
   • Overview of the market opportunity or problem being addressed.
   • Methods currently in use.
   • Objectives of the product/application development.
   • Alternative technologies or approaches considered.
   • Benefits of the selected technology or approach.
   • Challenges faced and lessons learned.
   • Current status.

Please do not discuss any material of a proprietary nature. With your permission, your presentation will be posted (as a .pdf) on our web site after the meeting as a community resource and for members who were unable to attend due to schedule conflicts or transportation difficulties.

Presentation Guidelines

The monthly meetings start at 6:30 PM, generally on the 3rd Thursday of each month:

1. Please limit your presentation to about 45 minutes. Generally, this maps to 15-20 slides, depending on the time needed per slide. Most speakers spend about 2-3 minutes per slide. We must clear the meeting room by 9:00 PM.
   
   
2. We have an LCD projector that can hook up to either a Windows PC or a Mac laptop. Generally the speakers bring their own laptop with the presentation preloaded. Let us know in advance if you need any additional audio/visual equipment.
   
   
3. The Q&A session after the formal presentation is meant for questions of general interest. Some attendees like to ask questions during the presentation. It is up to you how you address these. If it is a simple question, you are free to answer it interactively during the presentation; or you can ask the member to hold questions until the end.
   
   
4. The Vice-Chairman is available to assist you. If you feel bogged down by a particular member's questions, or if you feel the discussion is drifting away from the main topic, you can ask the Vice-Chairman for guidance, We will use this as a hint to stop the endless discussion during the formal meeting.
   
   
5. If you have the time and the inclination, you can answer questions that are of interest to selected attendees after the formal meeting is adjourned.
   
   
6. Please use a reasonable size font so that the entire audience can read the material. We recommend at least 36 point font for headlines and 24 point font for sub-text.
   
   
7. Also, use colors that provide high contrast between the text and the background.
   
   
8. With your permission, we will post a /pdf version of the presentation on our web site after the presentation. Either you can provide us the /pdf file or we can convert your PowerPoint to .pdf.

Thank you.