Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking, and offer the chance to try out conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are also an opportunity to present your single biggest bang-for-the buck idea quickly. Use this as an opportunity to give a talk for the first time, or the first time on a new topic. For a Lightning Talk, slides are not required, but if you do decide to make slides you only need a few.

Maybe you're nervous and you're afraid you'll mess up. It's a lot easier to plan and deliver a five-minute talk than it is to deliver a long talk. And if you do mess up, at least the painful part will be over quickly. Maybe you don't have much to say. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. Maybe you have a lot of things to say, and you're already going to give a talk on one of them, and you don't want to hog the spotlight. There's nothing wrong with proposing several Lightning Talks. Hey, they're only five minutes.

Lightning Talk speakers must be a registered conference delegate.