OK, so I've been referring y'all over to The Job Stalker for catching up on what I'm doing, but tonight I'm going to sort of do a two-for-one, since what I'm going to be posting over there is the same stuff that I'm going to be talking about over here, so as soon as I can get this nailed down, I'm pretty much just going to cut-and-paste it in over in that for my Wednesday post.Tonight I was off at Ignite Chicago to help my P2PMicroversity associate Ed Hubbard with his presentation. This is one of the projects on which I've been acting as a consultant (unfortunately, unpaid, but with equity), and I've cranked out quite a lot of hours on this over the past couple of weeks, developing his PowerPoint deck for this, and working up the note cards that he abandoned just before going on (I also shot a video of his talk which should be up on the P2P site sometime tomorrow).
The Ignite format is interesting as each speaker is supposed to come up with 20 slides (I suppose that's an anachronistic term at this point, isn't it?), which will be automatically triggered at 15-second intervals, providing for a 5-minute speech. This is the second of these I've been to (I missed the last one), and it's interesting to see how different people adapt to the format. For those who are trying to follow a basic script, they can get quite lost, but those who time out their talk into 10-15 second blocks and let the changing slides cue them, it can be quite effective.
Tonight there were a dozen presentations, ranging from "How To Make Your Own Bacon" to "Questions Concerning Technology" which looked at tech from the perspective of the philosopher Heidegger! Ed's presentation on "Social Education" was well received, and generated a lot of conversations afterward.
The event was at the always-remarkable Catalyst Ranch (down at the historic Haymarket Square), which is somewhat like going to an event in Pee-wee's Playhouse! It was well-attended (especially given that it was going up against a couple of other events), with nearly 100 folks showing up. A good evening all the way around: promoting P2PMicroversity, networking, and hearing some interesting talks.
More later ...