Wellington
Perl Mongers

Lightning Talk Meeting - March 11, 2008

The March 2008 meeting will be a lightning talk meeting and we need you to be a part of it! Here's how it will work:

• Instead of the usual one or two long talks, we're aiming to have about a dozen very short talks. Each one will be a maximum of five minutes long (you don't have to use all five minutes).
• You will need to 'sign-up' in advance. Email perlmongers@catalyst.net.nz with your name and talk topic.
• One person can sign up for more than one talk so sign up early and often.
• Slides are definitely not mandatory, it's probably more important that you practise what you're going to say.
• If you are going to use slides, bear in mind that there is no time between talks for messing around unplugging laptops etc, so your slides must be emailed in advance to the address above in either HTML format (will be viewed via Mozilla Firefox), PDF or the OpenOffice.org 'Impress' format.
• Do not turn up on the night with a whizzy demo program on your laptop expecting to plug it in.
• If you have something that's going to take longer than 5 minutes, great! You can do that one another evening :-) For this meeting, think of something that won't take as long.
• Rants are good - it is interesting to listen to someone talking about something they feel passionate about.

What can you say in five minutes?

Here's a list of ideas stolen from Mark-Jason Dominus' lightning talk page:

1. Why my favorite module is X.
2. I want to do cool project X. Does anyone want to help?
3. Successful Project: I did project X. It was a success. Here's how you could benefit.
4. Failed Project: I did project X. It was a failure, and here's why.
5. Perl Heresy: People always say X, but they're wrong. Here's why.
6. You All Suck: Here's what is wrong with the Perl community.
7. Call to Action: Let's all do more of X / less of X.
8. I stopped coming to Perl Mongers meetings because ...
9. Wouldn't it be cool if X?
10. Someone needs to do X.
11. Perl Wish List
12. Why X was a mistake.
13. Why X looks like a mistake, but isn't.
14. What it's like to do X.
15. Here's a useful technique that worked.
16. Here's a technique I thought would be useful but didn't work.
17. Why module X sucks.
18. Comparison of modules X and Y.
19. We should be paying more attention to X.
20. My Favorite Perl Feature
21. A Random Module from CPAN

What do I do now?

Email perlmongers@catalyst.net.nz with your name and talk topic.