On February 20th, 2025, I presented a new version of my lightning talks workshop with Madison Women In Tech.

TLDR: new versions of the slides:

The first two times I ran this workshop it took two and a half hours. And it had the following format:

  • 15-20 minutes: presentation to the group about lightning talks and some structure for how to write one.
  • 90 minutes: individual work time. We had a handful of mentors on hand to be sounding boards and generally help guide participants who felt stuck
  • 30-45 minutes: we came back together as a group and people presented their talks.

For this event we only had less than two hours so I had to come up with a way to shorten the format. One of my goals was to give people a chance to present even with the shorter time period. Actually presenting is one of the most intimidating parts, so I wanted to make sure people had to chance to experience it in the supportive environment of the workshop.

The presentation itself was already about as short as I could make it while still covering the important points, so I needed to find a way to reduce the individual work time.

I made two main changes to accommodate this shorter time frame:

  • Interspersed the work time with specific parts of the presentation. For example, after the slide about how to pick a topic, we paused for 5 minutes and had people brainstorm 10 potential topics.
  • We remove the time for creating slides. In the end people presented without slides. Some people had some quick sketches they drew on paper, but mostly people just had their notes.

While it was nice that in the first iteration people ended up with a more fully formed talk, I actually preferred this format. There are some improvements I would make to the slides. But I think breaking the work time up into smaller, more achievable goals, attendees had more direction. I think the best case scenario would be to have the full two and half hours, but break the work time up and interleave it with the presentation.