What's a "Lightning Talk?"

A lightning talk is a short presentation of your choosing, no longer than five minutes. Unlike scheduled talks, there is no approval process; speakers simply sign up during PyCon.

This quick pace forces speakers to focus on the essentials and treats the audience to ten different topics in an hour.

Sessions

PyCon 2007 had four separate sessions of lightning talks, more than any previous conference. We continue the trend in PyCon 2008, with a total of 5 hours scheduled for lightning talks!

PyCon 2008 will have three Lightning Talk sessions, after the scheduled talks on all three conference days (4:45pm on Friday, 4:10pm on Saturday, and 1:40pm on Sunday).

So You Want to Give a Lightning Talk...

Go for it! PyCon is a friendly and forgiving audience.

If you've never given a talk before, Lightning Talks are a good place to start. You don't need to make slides, but if you do, you only need to make three.

Be on time, because the five-minute slots fill up quickly! If all slots are full, consider creating or joining an Open Space session for your topic instead.

The five-minute limit is strictly enforced. The session moderator will remind you how much time you have left during the last two minutes. Practice your talk beforehand, and don't pack it tightly. Plan just to introduce your topic and to direct listeners to a website or contact address for more information. Five minutes is roughly equivalent to one or two pages of handwritten notes.

Lightning Talks don't have Question and Answer periods. If people want to talk further, they'll catch you in the hallway or contact you after the conference. If you sense significant interest, you can schedule an Open Space session to answer questions or discuss the topic more thoroughly. Be sure to include your project's URL and your contact info at the beginning and especially at the end of your talk!

Topic Suggestions

Anything related to Python is fair game. Here are some ideas:

• Lessons learned from a successful project
• Post-mortem wisdom from my failed project
• Heresy: Everyone says "____," but they're wrong, and here's why
• I want to write this cool software--who's with me?
• A preview of the scheduled talk you're giving later in the conference
• A funny thing happened on the way to the newsgroup / forum / mailing list
• The best Python library that no one knows about is...
• Wouldn't it be cool if we could do "______" in Python?
• You all suck: the Python community needs to...
• Call to action: Let's all do more (or less) of "______"
• My Python / Python 3000 wish list
• Here are some of the tricks and techniques I use every day
• The outside world: We should be paying more attention to...
• Let's compare two competing Python packages

For More Information

Contact "Lightning Talks Coordinator" Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Details on the PyCon Staff page.