Next Meeting: Tuesday, February 4, 2025
LOCATION CHANGE: Due to a scheduling conflict with our usual location, for THIS MONTH ONLY (February 2025) we will be meeting at TEKsystems's location in Turkey Creek at this address:
11400 Parkside Dr. Suite 100
Knoxville, TN 37934
Click here for link to directions to our February meeting location
This will be a hybrid meeting -- both in-person and remote.
Click here for our Zoom link.
Click here to RSVP to the in-person meeting. (Please help us let our sponsors know how much food to provide)
6:00pm - 7:00pm -- Meet & Greet
7:00pm - 8:00pm -- Speaker Presentation
8:00pm - 10:00pm -- After Party
Presenting Technical Data to Non-Technical People
Have you ever had a presentation that fell flat on its face? Perhaps you’ve had a pitch for a product that you wanted/needed to succeed, but it was shut down because no one understood how it would help? How about meeting resistance from others, only to find out later that they simply didn’t understand how your information might affect them? This talk will provide the basic foundations for good communication, provide the tools to tailor technical communication for several types of non-technical scenarios, and explore ways to navigate audiences of mixed expertise. We will start at the basics and work our way up to more complex situations. By the end of the session, attendees will have been presented the tools needed to prepare and deliver technical information to mixed audiences and different levels of expertise.
About the speaker
Alex Franklin, ORNL
Alex is a self-taught IT professional that has worked in television, healthcare, and now a National Lab. After 2 brief stints in 2 different colleges out of high school, Alex hung up the books and classrooms temporarily to become a Martial Arts instructor in 1999 and opened his own school in Maryville, TN in 2001. In 2005, Alex went back to school and graduated with an Associates of Applied Science in Design before teaching himself IT. It was a long, twisting road to his current position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Kubernetes Platform Engineer, but those experiences allowed him unique perspectives that he brings with him to both his professional and private life.
Outside of work, Alex enjoys the creative endeavors, such as art, writing, photography, video and photo editing, sighing heavily as he builds and often destroys things in his homelab, and the occasional glass of Bourbon, Mojito, or Amaretto Sour. He loves exploring technologies that are TRULY open source, riding in his Jeep Wrangler with the roof off, and spending time with his wife, children, and pittie best friend, Brom.
Have you ever had a presentation that fell flat on its face? Perhaps you’ve had a pitch for a product that you wanted/needed to succeed, but it was shut down because no one understood how it would help? How about meeting resistance from others, only to find out later that they simply didn’t understand how your information might affect them? This talk will provide the basic foundations for good communication, provide the tools to tailor technical communication for several types of non-technical scenarios, and explore ways to navigate audiences of mixed expertise. We will start at the basics and work our way up to more complex situations. By the end of the session, attendees will have been presented the tools needed to prepare and deliver technical information to mixed audiences and different levels of expertise.
About the speaker
Alex Franklin, ORNL
Alex is a self-taught IT professional that has worked in television, healthcare, and now a National Lab. After 2 brief stints in 2 different colleges out of high school, Alex hung up the books and classrooms temporarily to become a Martial Arts instructor in 1999 and opened his own school in Maryville, TN in 2001. In 2005, Alex went back to school and graduated with an Associates of Applied Science in Design before teaching himself IT. It was a long, twisting road to his current position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Kubernetes Platform Engineer, but those experiences allowed him unique perspectives that he brings with him to both his professional and private life.
Outside of work, Alex enjoys the creative endeavors, such as art, writing, photography, video and photo editing, sighing heavily as he builds and often destroys things in his homelab, and the occasional glass of Bourbon, Mojito, or Amaretto Sour. He loves exploring technologies that are TRULY open source, riding in his Jeep Wrangler with the roof off, and spending time with his wife, children, and pittie best friend, Brom.
