SpeakerRate
SpeakerRate is a public platform for providing honest feedback to speakers, and for speakers to develop a portfolio of their own.
If you’ve gone to a conference, you’ve probably seen the feedback forms passed around at the end of a talk. Maybe you fill one out — you probably don’t. Then they get collected, their results are compiled, and the conference organizers may or may not pass the feedback along to the speakers — they usually don’t. Unless all of those pieces of the equation happen, your feedback isn’t received, the conference doesn’t improve the following year, and the speaker has no feedback to help him or her improve.
SpeakerRate, our first PointlessCorp project at Viget, was the answer to this. Anyone at all can enter a talk of any sort into the system, and anyone can rate and review it. The speaker then has a place to find this feedback, and in fact can develop a bit of a speaking portfolio on the site, based on the cumulative ratings she has received from each of her talks.
So far, SpeakerRate has been written up by a number of respected sites, and has been generally well-received. Since it’s a spare-time project, it may take us a while to account for all of the great feedback we’ve gotten, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that SpeakerRate will land a spot in the hearts and minds of the speaker and conference-goer communities.
