Lightning Talk

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A Lightning Talk is a short presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers.

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[edit] History and format

Lightning Talks may have originated at the Python conference in 1997[1], where they were simply called short talks. The term "lightning" was first used for a similar session of short talks at the YAPC 19100 Conference in June 2000 [2] and gradually spread to other technical conferences.

Formats vary between venues. Most conferences will assign a speaking slot (30 to 90 minutes) to them and arrange several talks one after the other during the session.

The length of talks are usually between 1 and 10 minutes with a 5 minute limit being common. In order to allow rapid changes between speakers, slides may either be discouraged or a single computer running a Presentation program (such as OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft PowerPoint) is used by all speakers.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wanted: Short Talks. Retrieved on 2008-03-20.
  2. ^ Talks that were presented at YAPC 19100. Retrieved on 2007-01-27.

[edit] Links

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