A lightning talk is a very short presentation lasting only a few minutes, given at a conference or similar forum. Several lightning talks will usually be delivered by different speakers in a single session, sometimes called a data blitz.
Some formats of lightning talk, including PechaKucha and Ignite, involve a specific number of slides that are automatically advanced at fixed intervals. Lightning talks are often referred to as ignite talks.
The YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) 19100 Conference came up with the term "lightning talk" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The term was first coined by Mark Jason Dominus in June 2000. [1] [2] The practice of lightning talks was first known to be used at the Python Conference in 1997, but was not named until the YAPC 19100 Conference. [3]
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Lightning talks are designed to be short presentations between five and ten minutes long, but are usually capped at five minutes. [4] Most conferences will allot a segment of roughly 30 to 90 minutes long to speakers. Talks are arranged one after the other during the sessions. The talks are usually given at conferences in order for the event to have many speakers discuss a multitude of topics. The conferences are held in order for individuals to be able to share their ideas and concepts to people who have experience in the specific field. [5] Lightning talks are brief which requires the speaker to make their point clearly and rid the presentation of non-critical information. This causes the audience to be more attentive to the speaker and gain a broader array of knowledge from the presentations given. [6]
The format of lightning talks varies greatly from conference to conference. [7] Slides may be discouraged, and a single computer running a presentation program is used by all speakers. In general lightning talks are given in a format that can include slides but if so, the speaker must be careful not to read the details which they include. [4]
The term data blitz is sometimes used to refer to a session of lightning talks, particularly at academic conferences in the sciences and social sciences such as the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. [8]
The goal of lightning talks is to articulate a topic in a quick, insightful, and clear manner. These concise and efficient talks are intended to gain the attention of the audience, communicate key information, and allow for several presenters to share their ideas in a brief period of time. [9]
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoint for about $14 million three months after it appeared. This was Microsoft's first significant acquisition, and Microsoft set up a new business unit for PowerPoint in Silicon Valley where Forethought had been located.
Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., doing business as Esri, is an American multinational geographic information system (GIS) software company headquartered in Redlands, California. It is best known for its ArcGIS products. With a 40% market share, Esri is the world's leading supplier of GIS software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications.
In computing, a presentation program is a software package used to display information in the form of a slide show. It has three major functions:
The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference series is a hacker convention sponsored by the security hacker magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly that until 2020 was typically held at Hotel Pennsylvania, in Manhattan, New York City. Occurring biennially in the summer, there have been fourteen conferences to date. HOPE 2020, originally planned to be held at St. John's University, was instead held as a nine-day virtual event from July 25 to August 2, 2020. The fourteenth HOPE, "A New HOPE," was held at St. John's University in Queens from July 22 to 24, 2022. HOPE features talks, workshops, demonstrations, tours, and movie screenings.
A keynote in public speaking is a talk that establishes a main underlying theme. In corporate or commercial settings, greater importance is attached to the delivery of a keynote speech or keynote address. The keynote establishes the framework for the following programme of events or convention agenda; frequently the role of keynote speaker will include that of convention moderator. It will also flag up a larger idea—a literary story, an individual musical piece, or event.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. Its main conference has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages.
Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars, webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-level web meeting context, in an attempt to disambiguate it from the other types known as collaborative sessions. The terminology related to these technologies is exact and agreed relying on the standards for web conferencing but specific organizations practices in usage exist to provide also term usage reference.
An academic conference or scientific conference is an event for researchers to present and discuss their scholarly work. Together with academic or scientific journals and preprint archives, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers. Further benefits of participating in academic conferences include learning effects in terms of presentation skills and “academic habitus”, receiving feedback from peers for one's own research, the possibility to engage in informal communication with peers about work opportunities and collaborations, and getting an overview of current research in one or more disciplines.
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization.
Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC), from 2016–2019 called The Perl Conference (TPC), from 2020 on The Perl and Raku Conference, is a series of conferences discussing the Perl programming language, usually organized under the auspices of The Perl Foundation and Yet Another Society, a "non-profit corporation for the advancement of collaborative efforts in computer and information sciences". The name is an homage to yacc, "Yet Another Compiler Compiler".
The Open Source Developers' Conference (OSDC) was a non-profit conference for developers of open-source software. It was started in Australia in 2004, and later expanded to Israel, Taiwan, Malaysia, France and Norway, where conferences began in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2009 and 2015, respectively. No further conferences have been held since 2015.
PechaKucha is a storytelling format in which a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each. At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather at a venue to share personal presentations about their work. The PechaKucha format can be used, for example, in business presentations to clients or staff, as well as in education settings.
Ignite is a series of events where speakers have five minutes to talk on a subject accompanied by 20 slides, for 15 seconds each, automatically advanced. Ignite started in Seattle, and it has spread to over 350 organizing teams in cities, universities, governments and companies who have hosted thousands of events.
Teresa M. Amabile is an American academic who is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.
Nancy Duarte is an American writer, speaker, and CEO. Duarte is the author of several books, including slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations (2008), Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences (2010), the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (2012), and Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies and Symbols (2016). She is the CEO of Duarte, Inc.
Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. It has taken place in several locations around the world. The first conference, then known as TechEd, happened in 1993 in Orlando, Florida, United States. The 2014 TechEd in Barcelona marked the last event using that name. Microsoft altered its conference schedule and introduced the Microsoft Ignite name from 2015 on.
The Online Consciousness Conference held at Consciousness Online was founded in 2008 by Richard Brown, then a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center. The conference was inspired by and partially modeled on the Online Philosophy Conference started by Thomas Nadellhoffer and Eddie Nahmias, with one major difference being the heavy use of homemade video and audio presentations, and another difference being the restricted focus of the conference on consciousness studies as opposed to all of philosophy.
An amplified conference is a conference or similar event in which the talks and discussions at the conference are 'amplified' through use of networked technologies in order to extend the reach of the conference deliberations. The term was originally coined by Lorcan Dempsey in a blog post. The term is now widely used within the academic and research community with Wankel proposing the following definition:
CSICon or CSIConference is an annual skeptical conference typically held in the United States. CSICon is hosted by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which is a program of the Center for Inquiry (CFI). CSI publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer.
James Ward is an English writer and the founder of Boring Conference.