Safe as Milk

Lightning Talks

June 5, 2006 8:58 am Dave Neary gnome, guadec

We will be having Lightning Talks again this year at GUADEC!

For those who missed last year’s talks, we got wowed by (Dave Reveman?)’s wobbly windows and cubic workspaces, Jonathan Blandford’s demo of Evince, J5 showing off his worth on session management, and Sebastien Tricaud showing off Gscore, the first application to fully use Cairo for its rendering, among others.

This year, we already have some interesting candidates – for example, a GStreamer based media center, desktop tagging with Leaftag and a demo of the Pitivi non-linear video editor.

Sign up on the wiki to stake your claim for a lightning talk spot – there is no lower limit on the amount of time that you take, but talks are limited to 5 minutes including set-up time. It’s fast & furious, and a great way to get wider attention for your project or idea – pique our curiosity – people can always spend the rest of the conference hasseling you for details, show us why your work is great.

Some tips on lightning talks from perl.com will help you make a killer presentation:

• Prepare. Don’t stand up without an idea of what you want to say.
• Avoid slides. You’ll spend precious time setting up your laptop. If you use them, have everything set up, and test with the projector before your talk.
• Get to the point. Introduction is fine, but if you’re not into the meat of what you want to say after 30 seconds, you’ll run out of time.

Update: Thanks to Daniel Glassey for letting me know he wasn’t the wobbly cubey guy. I’d like to know who it was though…