PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

I recently attended my second Ruby Ireland meetup, something that I appreciate being able to go to and talk (and drink) geek for a couple of hours.

Last Tuesday there were two sessions: first, Feargal Byrne from AdNet gave an introduction to the Ruby language and second, John Ward gave a talk on Amazon’s EC2 platform. Now I’m not one to complain, but given that I’ve done extensive research on both these topics, I didn’t really learn a whole lot and I found myself eagerly awaiting the wine session that succeeded the talks! That said, Ana’s summary of RailsConf plucked at my heartstrings – I’d have absolutely loved to have attended that and Katy , who lives near Portland, was well bitter that I didn’t visit her. But anyway, back to the point.

It’s not like the BarCamp format, where there’s a plethora of talks and you can tailor what you see to your interests and ignorance levels. If you’ve already done the research, you have to sit around for the full session and given two topics I was already versed in, that was over an hour of sitting tight.

Another problem is that in the room of about twenty attendees, from the questions and chats afterwards it was easy to see that the breadth of skills and knowledge areas was very wide – levels of knowledge of Ruby went from just interested to expert.

Anyway, I suggested to Qamir that a Lightning Talks format of the user group might better suit to the diverse range of attendees and also to encourage people who’ve not spoken before to get up and talk about things that they’re excited about but don’t necessarily want to research a whole 30-45 minutes on.

Briefly, an hour (or so) of Lightning Talks would be made up of short, snappy talks, five or six minutes each. The emphasis is to focus on things in brief, enough to plant the seeds of discussion, without getting too in depth. This means that speakers can be approached after their talk for the more intense parts of what they’re talking about, or for general post-talk discussion. It’s far easier to approach someone about a topic you’re interested in if they’ve just given a talk about it.

I came across the format at Super Happy Dev House in California last month. It was quite 50/50 in my levels of knowledge and ignorance, but the quick pace both kept me from getting bored of the things I already knew, and kept me from getting too much in a twist over the stuff that was way above my head. It also enabled me to approach one or two guys with the knowledge that they’d (potentially) be interested in a few ideas I had, or could help me with a few problems.

They’re really good for putting across either a quick overview, or focussing on the most important points.

I reckon I’ll also put out a request for a Lightning Talks session at the next BarCamp I attend (probably in Belfast ).

Update: The Wikipedia entry linked to above cites Pecha Kucha – where each presentation has 20 20 seconds slides. That’s a pretty cool idea too…