our take on (lightning) talks

[wgao19]

one liner: lightning talks are great, but we also notice we are starting to miss good long talks (react-knowledgeable/talks#29), how do we address this

context + problem

in short, we love lightning talks:

• most of our talks can be made better by refining and cutting down to a lightning talk time frame
• it's fast-paced, compact, and we can add more fun with bey timer
• the main body of teaching - learning process is learning, so we should talk less and not lecture, if we look at sharing ideas opening doors, our 10-min upper limit is more than enough

however, there are also talks that we will love but doesn't fit our time frame, especially deep dives into complex ideas (for example, react-knowledgeable/talks#29)

should quote our README here

The guiding principle of is to #learnInPublic, share knowledge and have fun. Everyone is encouraged to keep giving talks about what you learned and found interesting.

also, initially we went with lightning talks because there's another podium ReactJS SG that runs full-time talks. but it hasn't happened for 2 months so we can't effectively say "we can have this talk there"

it's probably a don quijote thing to say but i feel we should take up the responsibility of being very sensitive to good content and promoting it, it's some genuinely important thing for our community that we actually have the foundation to do

thoughts

i already have some thoughts around this, but feel free to skip all and propose ur thoughts

(click to expand)

issues

but "free style" talk proposal can also cause issue

• underprepared talks are a waste of time
• we need to watch out on product pitches without good technical reasons

refined problem(s)

• we need a system that we can effectively leverage to foster good content
• how can our proposals help with this
• do we need and do we possibly have the logistics to check content

ideas (open for discussion)

i apologize first for initializing this as an open discussion and ending up throwing out a lot of ideas already, but plz take all of the following proposals as open to discussion:

on talk proposal

• in our talk proposal template, instead of having only one format, separate by "types of talk" such as "learning", "problems encountered", "deep dive", "not react", etc.
• for each of those category, we can put down a different time frame (i.e., "deep dive" can be 25mins?)
• they can help us promote the kind of talks we like as well, namely, i'd say around learning, problems encountered, intuitive understanding

on talk content

• apparently we should catch all good content from around the world if they appear in town
• i suggest that during our night snack time we can try to lead the conversations to be about what are some of the interesting things we are working on / learning, and maybe some of the conversations can be later developed to talks (i do that anyway, cuz i dunno what else to start conversations with, and im apparently very awkward talking about random stuff but kind of not awkward if the person has interesting things to share about)

once again, just throwing out my own idea, completely open for more