I was listening to a webinar with Nancy Duarte and she refers to a No Slide Zone during Oracle’s 2007 OpenWorld conference. The idea was that presentations within the zone had to be made without any PowerPoint or other slide materials. She called the experiment “interesting,” but a “completely Luddite approach.”

As a confirmed “slide minimalist” I was curious about Oracle’s experiment and did a bit of digging. Turns out that, while the zone was free of slides, it was certainly not free of visual communications in other forms. Here’s the description on one blog:

…the No Slide Zone track prohibited the use of projected “slideware” decks, instead encouraging presenters to engage in creative and interactive presentation formats.

Sessions included a Jeopardy spoof focused on database security, a caged death match between old school and new school database admins, a content management cook-off, and a mad scientist laboratory cooking up “Enterprise 2.0” experiments.

I think interactivity along these lines has a place in some presentations, but it seems to me that in the absence of slides, people had to substitute other forms of visual stimulation. Anyone ready to try an “Only Speaking” presentation zone? Now that’s a Luddite .