Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I try the speech projects in practice?
The speeches are best held in a supportive environment, e.g. a course or a speaking club meeting. As long as you make sure you have supportive people for feedback around, it can work almost anywhere.
Why did you start collecting Speech Projects?
I want to create a collection of freely available exercises that can be used to train public speaking.
There is a lot of information on public speaking already. Why another website?
First, Speech Projects focuses on practical exercises.
Second, I want to target specific topics and audiences like IT, scientists or situations, icebreaker activities etc. Much of those are under-represented in the available corpus on public speaking.
Third, I found very little material that allows reuse under legally clear conditions (like the CC license).
Do you have a specific goal in mind?
I would be happy to see 50 diverse projects from 10 or more individual contributors.
Is there a PDF version of all projects?
An English and German PDF and EPUB containing all speech projects is automatically generated on (Gitbook).
What kind of projects are you collecting?
This book contains practical exercises in public speaking, meeting facilitation and communication in general. The projects should allow to rehearse these skills in front of a live audience, e.g. in a course or speaking club.
The projects themselves aim to be short, easy to write, and easy to read. Not a lot of theory. Instead, I want to lower the threshold for advanced speakers to share their experience.
Licensing
How do you handle intellectual property?
The material is 100% open. Everything is released under the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-SA or a less restrictive license. This means the material can be used by any non-profit organization with very few restrictions (e.g. printing and selling it is prohibited). At the same time the contributing authors are acknowledged.
May I reuse or modify the content?
You may publish and distribute modified, translated, extended or abbreviated versions of this document under these conditions:
- The new document is published under the same License.
- With the NC-license commercial use (any kind of selling the material) is prohibited.
- The original source is cited and it needs to make clear what is the derived work done by you and what the original contribution was.
May I put the logo of my club or organization on the material?
Yes, given that you:
- have the permission to use the trademark.
- release the new work under the same license.
- make clear that the original authors do not represent your organization.
Contributing
I would like to improve something. Can I do that?
Yes, absolutely. Contributions are most welcome!
Where can I find editable documents?
You find editable versions of this document can be found on https://github.com/krother/speech_projects.
How can I get a permission to edit?
First, create yourself an account on GitHub. If this looks too geeky, an account on Gitbook will also works.
Second, write to [email protected] to be added as a contributor.
Do I need any special IT tools?
No, there is a web editor.
What is the strange format of the text?
The format is called Markdown. It can be easily converted to a plethora of other formats. See the Markdown Tutorial at www.markdowntutorial.com.
What if I accidentally delete or destroy something?
All changes are tracked automatically. We can roll them back one by one.
Can I generate other text formats?
If you want to generate DOCX, HTML or PDF documents, please install pandoc (www.pandoc.org/).
Can I be sued if I mess up by accident?
In CC 4.0 licenses, there is a 30-day time window to correct breaches of the license. This makes getting into court very difficult.
Where can I find more information?
See the Creative Commons FAQ at www.creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/version4.