Lightning Talks

Good ideas deserve to be stolen. Lightning talks are such a fantastic idea that we just had to nick it. We were inspired to have our own lightning talks at 21C3 (last year) by the Perl community who may not have invented the concept but definitely introduced it to a larger audience at their YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference).

But what is a lightning talk? It’s a 5-minute talk you (for reasons of your own) don’t feel like doing as a full 1-hour presentation. Maybe the topic is too obscure. Maybe the research you want to present is still too much in progress. Maybe you just want to talk about a detail you noticed on the way to the congress. Maybe you have a cool software or hardware hack you need helpers for and just want to drop the name of your project. Maybe you got the idea for doing a talk at the congress itself and the deadline for the call for papers is long gone… There are really loads of reasons why you should do a lightning talk. Just be short and sweet. After 5 minutes, you will be cut off and it’s the next speaker’s turn.

There are also loads of reasons for attending the lightning talks (there is a 1-hour block of those each day at 22C3, with 10 talks in a row). It’s entertaining. You get to learn about a lot of different subjects in a short time. And even if one particular speaker is boring: hey, it will be over in just 5 minutes and a new topic will begin.

Did we get you interested? Then you should prepare your own lightning talk using these wonderful guidelines from perl.com and run, don’t walk to this page in our public wiki to register your talk (only a few slots left). Have fun!