Welcome to the community of AltExpo presenters.

We provide a venue for you present your ideas on the AltExpo website and to do a presentation at  AltExpo events.

We felt that your topic compliments our basic vision so please review the vision statement and see where we merge beliefs. As always, we welcome your suggestions, even in the area of our basic vision.

Here are some basic guidelines for presentations:

At AltExpo#4 (June '09) you will have one and a half hours to present and the idea is to pique people's interest so they will talk to you after the presentation to get more information on being involved with your projects or learn how to start their own projects using your model. Network, network, network! In other words, things don't just end when your talk is over.

It is very easy to get off schedule on these things, so let's all be ready to go *BANG* right when your time starts. Don't wait for people to get settled, just start. When it's the end of your talk time - STOP. You can continue to talk to people that still have questions all you want after your time is up outside the presentation area. Yield to the next presentation, so the schedule doesn't get messed up.

Handouts would be extremely helpful, but not necessary. We will try to have copying equipment available at AltExpo events to make additional copies (donations appreciated for supplies). You are encouraged to hand out fliers to anyone anywhere to help promote your talk. The emphasis is on YOU - your efforts can make your talk well-attended - we don't have a huge staff just working to make your talk well-attended. AltExpo staff will do their best, but are generally over-whelmed, so we are all dependent on each other promoting the event in general - grassroots power happens through how your individual efforts contribute to making the whole work better. It's kind of a cooperative thing.

You are encouraged to bring your own audience - get all your friends and family to come up to the event you are presenting at! YOU again ;)

Please cross-promote the Alternatives Expo and our website AltExpo.org to everyone you know through your lists and forums, etc. and by word of mouth. (There's YOU again!) -- There will be future AltExpos, whether connected to Free State Project events or otherwise, so this will be an ongoing effort with ongoing benefits to your issue or organization.

Jack is doing the scheduling - contact him at schedule@AltExpo.org to work on setting up or re-arranging your speaking time at AltExpo events to suit your schedule. Tell us what times work and what times don't work for you and we'll make everything fit.

Additional benefits to presenters:

Any presenter at the AltExpo will get their own AltExpo.org email address for follow up contacts. We will set this email address to forward to your preferred email address. We've been following the format of <your first name>@AltExpo.org. That makes it easy for people to write to you. In the event that there are 2 people with the same first name, we just go <first name first letter of last name>@...

All presenters get a blog on the AltExpo.org site. Just click on "my blog" in the left sidebar menu and make your entries there. To read someone else's blog, click on their username wherever you see it and it will take you to their user info, then click on their blog entries.

All presenters get access to forums discussing AltExpo issues (links shown in the left sidebar of each page and on the top tabs in some cases).

All presenters get their own webpage on the AltExpo.org site that they can edit themselves. Your site can contain pictures, videos, links, an essay - whatever you want to put there. It will be created by you. Steve Villee is the administrator/webmaster, so contact Steve@AltExpo.org if you have any questions on how to edit your page. First, though, please refer to our helpful page of instructions for presenters entitled "Edit presenters page". This should be helpful and hopefully will answer all your questions before you pester our beleaguered staff ;).

Your specific information:

We will send you specific info with your email and site information. It will look like this:

Your email address is *you*@AltExpo.org & mail sent to you there will be forwarded to *your preferred email address*.

Your webpage is: http://altexpo.org/*yoursite* - the page is set up with *you* as the "author". The content on the page at the beginning is just dummy text put there by the staff. You can re-create the whole page from scratch.

You have to be a registered user of the site to edit the page. Once you are registered, we will set it up with you as the "author" of the page, so it should show up to you with an "edit" tab at the top of the page when you are logged on. To everyone else it will appear without the edit tab.

Just keep it clean and don't advocate anything illegal on your page! Make it upbeat. fun, interesting and be sure to always tell people what they can do next if they agree with you - a "Call to Action" and how to contact you - use the @AltExpo.org address preferably.

Thank you and I hope you'll come up to the next AltExpo event with an inspiring presentation of your ideas and projects,

Jack Shimek
Alternatives Expo Coordinator