Open Elements

Last night I had the opportunity to deliver yet another technical speech to my Toastmasters club; the goal of this speech was to “persuade with power”.
Like all my speeches, I delayed my efforts until the very end because I couldn’t think of anything to persuade the crowd with.  Just hours before my deadline, I decided that I would persuade them to consider open source software.
My speech was a hit with a few members of the audience, and lasted almost 10 minutes, a new record for me!
Although I didn’t use any visuals during the speech, one of the suggestions I received was to include a nice visual representation of the topic; so I put together a quick timeline to point out a few milestone in open source. This might come in handy for another speech.