Speaker Deck

Inspiration

Recently I came across a website called Speaker Deck while searching for some information on the web.  A presentation by a speaker was referenced, and his slides was hosted on this site.  This is actually a simple website but with a nice grid (or card) layout and well classified into different categories.

PowerPoint presentation is in the life of many business people.  It is a common practice that audiences would wish to get a copy of the presentations.  There are websites like Slideshare already doing this for years, but the initial user feeling of the Speaker Deck website is very different.

In an organization, the way things are categorized could be very different from a public website.  For an internal repository, private taxonomy can be very significant because it speaks the same language and terminology for the company and in the industry.  This is a big difference in user experience.  On top of that, taxonomy can be managed for an internal system, and security controls can also be applied accordingly.

Application in KM

This can be a good feature for the KM portal in an organization, and is not difficult to be built using BYOS, with the following features:

• Decks of slides uploaded to the portal.  Original files available for download in PPT or PDF format, or both.
• The front page of the PPT aligned properly in a card layout format.
• Titles of individual deck displayed together with Author's name.
• Like button built with each deck, and the number of likes to be displayed, together with the viewing statistics.
• Controlled taxonomy for classification of the slides not more than 8-10 at the first level, lined across top of the page.
• Search function available combining with tagging.
• An optional sound track can also be added side-by-side with the decks, if available.  Voice recording is easy to achieve in real life business environment.

This way an internal presentation repository portal can be made available in an organization at an absolutely low cost.

Access Control

It is likely that access control be implemented from within an organization, but that's already available in the BYOS system, ready for implementation.

A Deck Embedded in Web Pages

Below is a deck on the Speaker Deck website, which was uploaded by the author. A presentation slide can be embedded into a website easily, with the built-in page advancing control.