Curating Talks

#What does the curator do?

1. As the curator you will be selecting the speakers for the month you've taken on.
2. Once you've selected speakers (before contacting them) you should mention, with links - which talks you're thinking of including.
3. Add their names, twitter handles and talk titles to the meetup page for the month you're responsible for.
4. If you'd like to invite someone who is from out of town - be sure to let the other organizers know before you contact them in case someone has already contacted that person, and so that we can check how much money we have to help with transportation costs, etc.
5. Send an email to the speakers a week before the event giving them more details to make them know they're taken care of, something along the lines of this sample email (make sure they know how much people love hanging out with speakers at the after-event!)
6. You will also be responsible for either being the MC or asking one of the other organizers to be the MC. This includes reviewing/updating the slides.
7. Meet with the speakers prior to the meetup event to help with A/V checks and to review expectations and guidelines for their talks (incl. time constraints)
8. The MC is responsible for introducing the speakers with a 1-2 sentence hype-up intro. Ask the speakers ahead of time how they'd like to be introduced. For example, "Next we have a super-successful engineer who has built some things you've probably used, like jQuery, Mozilla Firefox, and Mac OS X. He's going to talk about teamwork: let's welcome LeBron James!"
9. During the meetup, for individual talks, please give the speakers silent five and two minute warnings (holding up fingers from the back of the room is fine)
10. FINALLY - you should select the curator for the following month. Curators should be organizers but if the opportunity comes up we can consider having a "guest" curator.

##Timeline

• Contact speakers at least 2-3 weeks in advance (a good rule of thumb is to have all talks booked for the upcoming event within a week after the previous event)
• Any speakers that have been booked in advance will be announced at the prior meetup but all three speakers don't need to be selected by then.

##Some thoughts/opinions/advice

• Try to keep variety when selecting the topics. It's nice to have at least one talk for noobs and another for ninjas, a mix of node and front-end, a mix of technical and story-driven talks, a mix of speakers -- all kinds of diversity is great!
• Keep correspondence between you and the speakers in the GitHub issue threads as much as possible, in case something comes up and someone else needs to pick up the month.

##Our talk guidelines

• Talks should be 5-20 minutes long NOT LONGER!
• Technical talks are preferred but the occasional non-technical but related talk is fine.
• Presenters should have slides. You don't need to confirm this - but if asked - Yes, they should have slides.